If we had a guaranteed payment to everyone in the country of, say, $500/month, what services could be gotten rid of? Could Social Security as it exists now be done away with? What about things like school lunch, public housing subsidies, SNAP, TANF, etc.?
A back of the envelop calculation shows that that payment would cost $2 trillion/year. Social Security receipts by comparison were a bit less than $900 billion in 2014.
If you wanted to have a basic income, would it be better to pay per person or per household?
I’d be surprised if anything could be gotten rid of except other programs that replace income directly - disability, social security and unemployment, for example.
Programs that provide non-cash benefits are probably still necessary. Take school lunches as an example. It would be nice if the kids who needed school lunches were going hungry only because of poverty. I’d like to live in that world. The reality is that plenty of them need school-provided lunches because of parental mental illness, substance abuse and other forms of child neglect. I suspect that child health insurance and most housing benefits would be similar.
As a partial cite of what I’m saying: according to this source (PDF), 11 million children in the US have parents who are addicted to alcohol alone. It says “It is estimated that parental substance abuse and addiction are the chief cause in at least 70-90% of all child welfare spending.”
$500 might be too low, as well. Finland is working on this concept (though it’s not clear on exactly how far the idea will go), with a basic income of $870-ish, and they have far fewer really expensive locations and a lower overall per-capita GDP. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible even at $500, but it would certainly be more of an offset for programs.
I’ll off the more opinion or political questions for now, although they are interesting. Suffice it to say middle class voters would likely not go for such a proposal. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad, but that the risks and burden would most definitely not be shared equally.
$500/month, to replace Social Security? I’m on SS, and get over twice that much, yet can’t make ends meet. Even with Medicare, my prescription copays alone are often more than my income.
And if you keep increasing the payment amount, at some point you have to consider how much the economy is going to suffer because of the increased taxation . . . resulting in more unemployment, etc.
Multiple persons in a household can pool their resources, which is a good thing, but ensuring that a person’s benefit is not tied to a particular household would make it easier to leave abusive relationships, for adult children to relocate for better opportunities, and probably other benefits I can’t think of right now due to being a bit tired.
Several problems of a basic universal income
[ul][li] Undocumented people get no benefits; loosening documentation requirements will allow cheaters to get double benefits.[/li][li] Needs vary by location.[/li][li] Funds must be allocated to pay people who don’t need the extra income.[/li][li] Some needy people will waste the extra income on drugs or alcohol.[/li][/ul]
are solved in my proposed alternative:
Instead of a basic income, provide free or subsidized services: Government-paid healthcare and childcare, subsidized housing and public transport, some sort of support for soup kitchens.
As others have said, $500 is way too low, but we’d need to have some form of sliding “means testing” scale: recapturing the payments by increasing taxes on the first, say $50000 of income until the benefit disappears would be one way to do it. If you gave them $1000 per month, with an additional $500 for each child, then it would seem to be less than $2 trillion a year since $50000 is around the median household income, so half the people would be getting no benefit and the people that do would on average only receive half the benefit. This is distinct from any increase in taxes meant to pay for the program, since no one would be getting less money overall yet under the above scheme.
I don’t think we could immediately get rid of Social Security, since many people’s payments would be slightly higher than the basic income and it would not be fair to reduce them. We could sunset SS though, and probably have some savings if we use the same system of payments for basic income that we use for SS.
And universal healthcare with a yearly deductible of €50 (website of their Social Security page in English). Like all UHC systems it doesn’t cover every single medical expense, but still.
And universal healthcare with a yearly deductible of €50 (website of their Social Security page in English). Like all UHC systems it doesn’t cover every single medical expense, but still.
septimus’ post reminds me of my father grumbling, back when new public universities were popping up like mushrooms in the fall all over Spain, that it would be more cost-effective to give full grants to students meeting appropriate means-testing and grades-based criteria than to build all that stuff. I think that, while having a system where people without other means get everything from the government isn’t feasible for the general population, making more and better services available benefits more people than a general allowance.
Back when I was in college, the equivalent of 500$/month would have been… a lot more than I had available for my own expenses. But if it had been given to my mother it would never have reached my hands, or my cousins’ hands if it had been given to their mother. Nowadays, I’m well-off enough that half of it would become taxes again :smack:
A basic minimum income would work best in tandem with social security and medicare. Incorporate the current benefits like food and housing for low-income families and their children and combine it into a single transfer.
There should be no additional benefit for children. We’ve been incentivizing the wrong kinds of behavior long enough, which is why cycles of poverty continue. We need fewer unprepared parents bringing children into environments where they fall so far behind by the age of five that they’ll almost surely never catch up.
Little to add, other than that NPR aired a Freakanomics radio show yesterday addressing several aspects of the topic. Folks viewing/posting in this thread might find the podcast interesting.
[li] Undocumented people get no benefits; loosening documentation requirements will allow cheaters to get double benefits.[/li][/quote]
Is it really the government’s responsibility to support undocumented people? With the current system, they’re not really getting any services anyway. It seems to me the best approach would be to facilitate people becoming documented, legal residents and employees so that they can properly contribute and also properly take advantage of various government services.
As for cheaters, they’re always going to exist, it’s a question of balancing how hard it is to stop them with whether or not those costs are worth it. The advantage of a system like this, rather than having a bunch of complicated forms and systems, it’s straightforward. One person, one payment. You don’t need to check for as many things so more resources can be used to ensure each person is legit.
[quote]
[li] Needs vary by location.[/li][/quote]
This is true, but if you’re talking about this at a federal level, they can only do so much. Maybe the best way to implement this would be at a state or even local level.
[quote]
[li] Funds must be allocated to pay people who don’t need the extra income.[/li][/quote]
Yes, but so what? Using the OPs numbers, if the cost is $2trillion, then that cost is spread across the tax base, so people who need the money would pay little or nothing in taxes and get that benefit, and the people who don’t would pay a little more. That is, it should be largely a wash or even a slight tax increase for people that don’t need it because that money has to come from somewhere.
[quote]
[li] Some needy people will waste the extra income on drugs or alcohol.[/li][/quote]
And this happens with current systems too. People trade food stamps for drugs. People trade prescription drugs they’re legitimately prescribed for other drugs. People spend disability payments on drugs. Even people who have nothing of value will trade sexual favors or drift from one crappy job to another sleeping in their cars or on people’s couches and trading what little they can get on drugs. People are going to make bad decisions no matter what you do. If anything, you’re exacerbating the problem because $50 in food or in a less desirable prescription drug is going to trade for less than $50 in cash, so people put themselves in more desperate situations. The answer isn’t to install a government bureaucracy, it’s to end the drug war and get people help
This is just really a question of philosophy. For a fixed amount of money, who provides better services, the free market or the government? If you think the former, then the OPs proposal is the obvious answer. Even if you think the latter, what about the services you don’t need? For instance, I don’t have kids I don’t need childcare, so I don’t spend money on it. Or what if I can arrange for a place to stay with friends or family instead of subsidized housing? Instead I can spend that money on something else, maybe even on something that can slowly help lift myself out of a situation where I need that just to survive.
Further, each of these services requires a government agency to administer which has costs associated with it, where a basic income just requires one to replace it that just has to verify people and send them a check. The latter is clearly going to have a lower overhead. They’re both redistributions of wealth (which isn’t inherently an evil phrase, virtually all forms of government intervention are), just one is allowing those receiving it to decide how to spend it and the other isn’t.
Personally, I’m not sure it’s better, there may still be some services that the government is better at or ought to for some other reason (an obvious one being national defense), but I do think it’s an experiment in Finland and, regardless of their implementation and its success, it’s still an interesting thought experiment combining for some degree of social safety net but combining that concept with free-market solutions and personal agency in a way that many social programs to this point just don’t.
I must have synopsized my proposal poorly because you’ve completely misinterpreted it. My proposal involves NO means-testing or bureaucracy. The free healthcare would involve no paperwork except the usual keeping track of patient’s records. Subsidized housing, transport, etc. would be available to all. (Though well-off people will prefer better housing, personal cars, etc.)
Yes, if you have no children you won’t be able to exploit the free childcare. :smack: That’s a feature, not a bug. People who don’t need housing or medical services wouldn’t use those facilities — call my idea Marxist if that fits your political perspective.
One of the benefits that fiscal conservatives get behind on basic income is the elimination of means testing and the bureaucracy, waste, fraud, and administrative costs associated with it. This is the primary reason that most school lunch programs across the country are moving to “free or reduced lunch for all”.
I’d like to think we could eliminate the minimum wage in such a world. And also, disability, unemployment, and social security. Rent control and other housing subsidies as well.
But I’d like to see universal healthcare as a separate program, uncoupled from the basic income.
I just want to point out that the 2016 Federal budget has a TOTAL of 4 billion in expenditures.
2 trillion is half of that; unless services are drastically removed, we’re talking about a 50% increase in needed revenue, which means that taxes as a whole, are about to go way up.