I was answering **DWMarch ** who said:
Which is untrue, for all the reasons I pointed out.
Can I interject that I find the title of this thread intriguing and enlightening? “Apologist”… Like poverty is like Holocaust denial or Trutherism.
Lets say you make $50,000 (and lets say that is the median income) and your effective tax rate is 20% so your after tax income is $40,000.
We institute a basic income of $10,000 and rejigger the tax tables so now your effective tax rate is 33% and your after tax income is still $40,000.
Are you saying that there is no way to adjust the schedules so that the after tax income “for many people” will remain approximately the same?
I hate to speak for others, but I think the concern was that the federal budget is currently something like $4 trillion. If we increase that to $6 trillion to pay every adult in the country a universal basic income, the government has to get that extra $2 trillion from somewhere, and the obvious way is to collect another $2 trillion in taxes. I believe the posters pursuing that line were worried that the poor would end up paying extra taxes that would essentially cancel out the benefit they get from the UBI.
Knowing what I know about our current tax structure, I disagree. I’m confident that we’re a long ways from any sort of basic income proposal becoming a reality, but if it did, I’m equally confident that most of the extra taxes would fall on the top quintile, since they pay most of the tax dollars today. In my eyes, UBI = just another wealth redistribution scheme.
ETA: if you make $50K in America, your income tax burden is probably closer to $0 than $10K.
I think your numbers are wildly optimistic, but I appreciate you having the courage to put something out there.
The average bus driver’s pay is $30K (source). I don’t know what sort of benefits they’re usually entitled to (my guess would be they’re pretty meager), but I’d be SHOCKED if it was more than double their actual pay.
I don’t know much of anything about the cost of self-driving cars, but I’ll be impressed if they can be purchased new for only $33K in my lifetime.
Lets say you make $50,000 (and lets say that is the median income) and your effective tax rate is 20% so your after tax income is $40,000.
We institute a basic income of $10,000 and rejigger the tax tables so now your effective tax rate is 33% and your after tax income is still $40,000.
Are you saying that there is no way to adjust the schedules so that the after tax income “for many people” will remain approximately the same?
Basic income doesn’t have to be enough to reach the poverty level but frequently is discussed in those terms. This would amount to about $8000 per adult and $4000 per child in a household.
According to Kaiser Permanente, there are 16 million poor children and 30 million poor adults.
We would need about $300 billion to fund this program.
We would save $20 billion on HUD rent assistance, $75 billion on SNAP, 16.5 billion on TANF, $44 billion on SSI, about 10 billion in a shitload of tiny programs that should probably be merged into a single program called “aid for poor people with effective congressmen”, and some unknown amount set off from Social Security (eventually social security payments would be reduced by the basic income so you would get the higher of the basic income or social security, I have no idea how to calculate this).
This leaves ~$185 billion minus whatever we save in social security. A huge amount representing a 6% increase in federal revenue (or a 15% increase in income taxes), and that is probably why we don’t have it.
You can’t morally sell a program like Social Security as an individual benefit linked to life time contributions and then just steal it to pay for another program.
The reason we have SNAP, TANF, rent assistance, etc, instead of just giving the poor cash is because the poor are generally poor decision makers when it comes to money. What do we do with all the poor little children that got evicted because Mommy spent their basic income on meth, or Daddy lost it all at the slots in Vegas, or blew it at the strip club?
You can’t realistically expect to throw cash at poor people and have them all make good decisions with it. Some of them are going to waste it on unbelievably stupid purchases. And they’ll do it month after month for as long as you’re willing to keep giving them cash. What do we do with those poor people who are still homeless, hungry, or in poor health after UBI? Start up SNAP 2.0 and TANF 2.0 to cover the needs they failed to adequately budget for with their basic income?
I’m guessing that you don’t think it’s possible, or probable, to be poor unless you make bad decisions.
Anyway, there are already pilot programs in some cities/countries — perhaps we can take a look at what they do in such an easily predicable situation.
Absolutely not. I’m sure there are poor people who are poor through no real fault of their own. I’m also sure there are lots of poor people who manage their money very badly, and would manage their basic income very badly. Some would do it so badly that they wouldn’t budget for groceries through the end of the month, or to cover health insurance premiums, or their rent. When those people are evicted, out of food, or unable to pay their doctor’s bills, what do you think we should do with them? Tell them tough luck, go hungry / cold, because we cancelled Section 8 and SNAP to give you that big basic income check at the start of the month?
A city or county providing a basic income isn’t really an indicator of anything (although I’m curious to know which ones are trying this). If the residents of that city blow their basic income on lottery tickets, they’ll still have a whole slew of federal welfare programs to cover just about every other need (school lunches, heating fuel in the winter, groceries, cell phone bills, medical bills, etc.). It’d be different if the federal .gov were to cancel all those programs and replace them with a basic income. In that scenario, the poor don’t have a backup plan if they waste their inheritance on riotous living.
In addition to the points made by Ludovic, there is the convenience factor of door-to-door travel rather than having to walk a mile to wait for a bus out in the snow that may not even show up; I don’t think anyone who has had to use the bus on a regular basis would object to replacing them with self-driving cars.
As for how to pay for it, I am thinking the Federal Standard Milage rate (currently 54 cents per mile) plus an overhead cost per trip / time spent using the vehicle. This could be graduated by one’s income level, with the poor receiving a certain “milage allowance” and expanding the bus and subway systems so that cars service more short trips than long.
And this cost could be further subsidised by the taxpayer: if you think about the millions spent because of traffic accidents caused by human drivers (for example emergency surgery and rehabilitation, loss of life, time lost from work, car and other property repairs) it is much better for society to spend funds on improving itself than continually fixing damage caused by the current system – preventing fifty million-dollar accidents each year could buy 1500 cars alone!
First, we don’t set a tax tables to target effective tax rates. Income tax rates are based on tranches of income.
Second, in your example, that may work for the person that is earning $50K, but it fails once you have a person that earns $40K, or 100K, or any different amount.
Third, this is as I described in post #197, unless the tax rate on this new income is 100% (that’s how it would have to be in your example), then the income isn’t going to be subsumed by some new tax.
I’ve long supported a negative income tax which is directionally similar to what you are saying but much better fleshed out. But only as a replacement of all other transfer payments.
Well, if you want a good debate around here, sometimes you have to have a provocative thread title. 
Seriously though; what I was trying to do wasn’t to call out people who have deep concern for the plight of the poor. I was trying to call out the people who seem to have the attitude that the poor aren’t responsible for any of the things that might have caused their situation, and because of that poverty situation, they’re not responsible for the consequences of their actions.
I find that unconscionable, good or bad outcomes notwithstanding. To some degree, I tend to think that if you’re the recipient of a lot of public money, you ought to have to be more responsible with how you handle it/why you are receiving it than otherwise. In other words, you should be more careful with others’ money and stuff than your own, which is why the whole library book fine business resonated so negatively with me.
I don’t think I disagree with you as much as I want to rephrase you. Poor people need to be more careful with their money, no matter where they get it from, because the consequences of carelessness are more severe.
I understood the others in the library thread to be arguing that the consequences should less severe - that poor people should not be expected to pay fines at the same level as everyone else. That seems silly to me - it is not any harder for a poor person to be responsible with borrowed library books. Therefore if a person cannot pay to replace a book he has lost or stolen, he is no longer allowed to borrow books. That’s a good thing, because it increases opportunity for everyone else, rich, poor, or middle-class, to borrow books.
If you are too poor to pay your fines, bring your books back on time. Being responsible costs no more than the alternative - less, if anything.
And the same thing that DrDeth said several times in the other thread - if you have the resources to get to the library to borrow the books, you have the resources to get to the library to return them.
Regards,
Shodan
If someone is incapable of spending money responsibly, I would call that a mental health problem worthy of our compassion. They should be assigned a guardian to spend money on their behalf. With regard to doctor’s bills, I think we should have single payer healthcare so that would essentially be a non-issue (except for relatively small co-pays).
I don’t think the basic income is going to replace all government programs. Some people are going to require additional services, like mental healthcare and drug treatment.
Isn’t the problem concentrated poverty? Could we take steps to ensure that large numbers of poor folk aren’t clustered together?
There might be millions such folks in America. Where do we find millions such guardians?
Plus, potential for embezzlement this way.
As a poor person, I’d like to convey to you just how much your post oozes with condescension and contempt. You make the aristocrats from Downton Abbey seem humble by comparison.
There is a portion of poor Americans that I suspect would benefit greatly from a basic income, and probably use it in generally responsible ways to better their lives and those of their children. For others, it might be due to a lack of education (no one ever taught them, and they never stopped to consider, that they shouldn’t buy that Xbox game if the refrigerator is empty), but they wouldn’t use it responsibly. For some, there’s certainly a strong mental health component. I’m not sure how well treatment would work to transform mentally-ill impoverished folks into functional adults that were capable of responsibly handling thousands of dollars in income per month. It seems like they’d be ripe targets for abuse and fraud in a lot of cases, but I don’t know. Maybe mental health care is better than I imagine. As you mentioned, we could appoint guardians for them, but I suspect such a guardian system would be a magnet for abusers and it wouldn’t be long before we had horrifying stories of mentally ill basic-income-recipients kept locked in a dog kennel out back while their “guardian” lived high on the hog off their basic income, or similar-such stories.
Again, to re-iterate my position, I think just giving cash to poor people is a recipe for disaster, at least in some cases. With 45 million poor people in America, I’m sure there’d be a wide range of outcomes, but it’s certainly no universal cure for poverty.
Obviously you don’t have to tell me / us anything more, but you brought it up, and it piqued my curiosity. Are you living below the federal poverty line? If not, what’s your definition of “poor”? And to what would you attribute your poverty? Are you currently a college student? An elderly retired person? Medically disabled? Unemployed? Underemployed? Something else?
Breaking up the “concentrated poverty”, by moving poor urban dwellers out into the suburbs where they’re surrounded by upstanding suburbanite role models, seems to be the en vogue model for government housing assistance. As one of those upstanding suburbanites, I dislike it. My gut reaction is that it’s just spreading crime around (really bringing it to my neighborhood), rather than really reducing it, but I suspect someone has a study somewhere that would disagree with my gut. Here’s a more recent, more positive article along the same lines.