That seems odd. You will have to tax me for more than six thousand to cover the salaries at the IRS, and to get the money for everyone who doesn’t earn anything. You can save overhead by means testing the six thousand.
Plus you are going to run into the problem that different parts of the country have different costs of living. So either everyone gets enough to live on in San Francisco, even if they live in North Dakota, or people in San Francisco don’t get enough to live on.
Regards,
Shodan
How you work out taxes is totally unrelated. But by adding that means test you are adding two huge flaws to the system of welfare:
Additionally I’m sure you’d find that a great deal of people would means test themselves by simple not being assed to pick up the benefit. If you are $50k a year you bet you’re gonna be assed, if your on $250k a year are you ?
Actually I pointed this out as one of the flaws of the system earlier in the thread 
I have a deep seated personal hatred for paper work and filling out forms. Anybody who has ever applied for government aid should know what I’m talking about. Simplicity really is a virtue.
It’s easier for the benefits to go to everyone who needs it if it doesn’t need to be applied for (beyond the initial sign-up, which could be at birth). Setting up an enormous bureaucracy and labyrinthine regulations to determine who “deserves” help could end up costing more, less people receiving the help who need it, than simply direct depositing money into everyone’s bank account.
Actually, I wonder if the Basic Income idea is actually better at dealing with this problem than other kinds of welfare.
Assuming that the people who are most affected by the change are those at the margin - they want to work but welfare gives them a disincentive (as described by Griffin). The marginal cost of finding (and creating) employment would go down so it would actually be easier for those people under the new system. San Francisco would become a land of opportunity.
It would suck for the lazy bums (and for the genuinely unable to work, of course) - they would have to all migrate to North Dakota to survive.
It’s easy to focus on the people who fritter their money away, but I think it’s even more unjust to have government bureaucrats determine who is using their money wisely and who is using it unwisely.
If someone prefers to spend their Basic Income on Neon Signs and other useless crap and live in their car, then that’s their choice. I hope they’ll eventually wise up. But if that’s their idea of happiness, who am I to say they are wrong?
Plus, you are removing a big incentive for people anywhere the means test limit to earn income off the books.
It gets worse, actually. Since you don’t want an income level where making $5 more means you get $6K less, you will have to phase out the benefit gradually with income. That makes it even more complicated. And simple = cheap.
I once had a fun discussion at work about how great it would be if a pill was invented that eliminated the need to sleep…or would cut sleep needed to half an hour a day or something.
I pointed out that, while this would be a good thing, that they would end up working 16 hour days. They argued with me at first…and I pointed this exact thing out…housewives joining the workforce.
After a few years in a sleep-not-needed society…you would be pretty much forced to work 16 hours a day to keep your same lifestyle.
[sneeze]
ahhhh ahhhhh ahhhhhh bullshit**
[/sneeze]
That doesn’t make sense to me. A person working 8 hours a day should be able to produce just as much “stuff” as he was before. Perhaps more people would work longer days because they had more time available, but that only means you’ll be earning less relative to others, not in absolute terms.
I suspect at least a part of this is what could be called “lifestyle inflation”. We seem to require a lot more fancy stuff these days.
I could be wrong…but lets look at housing as an example. Let’s also say a new, cheap miracle drug was mass produced which eliminated the need to sleep.
At first, you could work a normal workday. However, a significant number of people will work extra hours because they like work, or want to increase their lifestyle etc.
They now have more money. This means more money is available for these folks to buy (as per the example) houses. This means people will bid higher for houses and prices will rise. Rents would climb as well because houses are worth more.
So, if you insisted on working a normal workday…you would find your salary not being able to afford as much a house or rent. You would be forced to lower your standard of living or work more hours.
Now, the above is assuming that you are paid the same. In all likelihood, your $ per hour would probably drop…as there is a vast increase in the labor pool and so downward pressure on salaries.
I can see this probably happened with women entering the workforce…how many average Joe people do you know that have one working adult, one at home and have a nice house? Today, it takes 2 Joe working stiffs to afford that modest house.
As far as the argument goes that people will kill themselves with drugs, if we as a society truly cared about saving people from themselves we should ban tobacco, because tobacco kills 25 times more people than all illegal drugs combined. 435,000 versus 17,000 in the U.S every year.
While this is partially true, I don’t think it is 100%.
My wife and I recently downsized in our housing. We have a very ‘lower middle class’ townhome in a decent suburb of a major city.
I, myself, make in the upper 15% of salary in the U.S. Even then, the price of the place is about double my yearly income. Now, this might not sound like much, but the rule of thumb in the past (when I was a young whippersnapper) is that you really shouldn’t spend more than 2x annual income to house…and no more then 2.5x.
Looking at the median income of Joe grunt in the area…and if both Joe and Jo grunt work and make that salary…they would be within 2.5x but more than 2x annual income to house…and this housing is considered LOWER MIDDLE CLASS.
No way that could be possible if the norm for working families was 1 working adult. Housing prices would not have increased that much.
I think that would be somewhat mitigated by keeping the 40 hour workweek and overtime rules in place. If employers have to pay you 150% of normal wage for every hour worked over 40 hours, it’s less likely that people would work that much more.
?
Just lower the normal wage…plus many positions are salaried.
To avoid hijack on the sleep thing:
It would be easier to dedicate yourself to low-paid non-profit work and other volunteerism if you have a guaranteed income to supplement it.
Why should we guarantee people the right to live in San Francisco?
You’re the person giving them the money, that’s who. If people want to spend their own money on neon signs, that’s their business. But when other people are giving them the money, they can set conditions on how it’s spent. And if you don’t like the conditions, you’re free to refuse the money.
If we’re put restrictions on how they spend their money, we will of neccesity have to have a bureaucracy to check up on their purchases, and we’ll likely spend even more money on the bureaucracy than if we just let them buy the neon signs in the first place. It may be possible, through scrimping and saving, for someone living on Basic Income to buy themselves something nice every now and then. Just like a person on food stamps might live off just rice and beans for a week so he can get lobster once, if someone can manage to afford something non-essential, we shouldn’t begrudge them that.
I think if someone actually does run into a serious gambling or drug abuse problem, the Basic Income will not be enough to sustain them. They’ll either get so desperate that they check themselves into rehab, or they steal in order to get their fix. At that point, they’ll eventually get caught and we can put restrictions on them afterwards. But until someone is proven to be mentally incapable of handling money, the default assumption should be that they are able to manage their own affairs.