The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM! No more poverty, except in self-inflicted cases (drug addiction, for example), or things like severe and very expensive illness (which are covered by other means). This can be paid for in large part by the abolition of welfare systems, unemployment, Social Security, etc.
The stock criticism is that people wouldn't work, because they wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't want such poorly motivated people working anyway, because they're not productive. And anyone who wants more than barely-poverty will get a job or start a business.
Another nice feature is that this supports people who want to do something productive but not financially valuable - charity work, ministry, art.
While I like the idea of a Basic Income, and have actually come to support it heartily, (if you don't, take a look at some of the economists who have, and why they do) you are being naive to think that "self-inflicted cases" are somehow anything other than a vast majority.
Almost all homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues. That's why they are unable to act on one of the endless options that exist at the moment that can get them even the most basic of accommodations and employment. The people your solution truly helps are the non-homeless poor. To be honest this is a much easier issue to address given some willpower. Then again, as a Canadian, I find basic medical care to be a no brainier as well, which seems to be something the US struggles with quite a bit.
You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
41% of the population will experience a diagnosable mental illness, and 26% have one in any given year. Clearly there is more to the issue than just blaming mental illness or there would be far more homeless people than there are right now.
Discovering what support structures work and making those more easily accessible seems like a great place for a disruptive start up, except that health care is so incredibly messed up no one wants to touch it with a ten foot poll.
You need to be careful when talking about the demographics of mental illness. Much mental illness leaves you still able to function and contribute socially to a fair degree.
> You can't simply suggest that addiction/mental illness is "self inflicted", give them $10K and say "You're on your own, bud." That isn't solving anything. Solving homeless is the same as solving mental illness and/or addiction, and those are massively hard problems to address.
Not true. You know how you can solve homelessness without solving mental illness and addiction EVEN IF (let's accept for the sake of argument) most homelessness is caused by mental illness and addiction?
It's really quite simple. You just give housing to mentally ill and addicted people. They are still mentally ill and/or addicted, but now they're not homeless, because you gave them a place to live.
correction: Nearly all chronic homeless have mental illness and/or substance abuse; the chronic homeless make up only about 1/8 of the homeless at any given time.
Unless you have a citation that says otherwise, anything I've seen seems to suggest that there is little difference in the high percentage of mentally ill/substance abusers between chronic/non-chronic homeless.
Just about every article I can find talking about substance abuse and mental illness in homeless specifically focuses on the chronic homeless so I inferred from that. A bit of googling turned up this non-scholarly article though that compares the overall rate of mental illness among homeless to that of the chronically homeless and found ~3x difference
The Job Guarantee or Employer of Last Resort (JG or ELR) program is a better solution.
1) Immediately moves the economy to full employment. All but eliminates social ills associated with unemployment.
2) Puts a floor on labor standards. That is in order to hire somebody out of labor pool, private business has to offer a better package. Health insurance should be automatic. (My Gosh prisoners get free health care!)
3) Counter-cyclical/Auto-Stabilizer/Buffer stock effect on macro economy. As economy improves people leave the JG program. As economy weakens, people shift into JG.
4) JG labor force can be put to work at local government levels to boost services.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
> The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM!
You left out the part where the money comes from. Your idea is fine and dandy, but I doubt you are currently implementing it yourself by spending your own money. The idea depends on everybody being forced to pay.
Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort. I disagree with your premise that people who work for rewards are unmotivated.
Those who think this is a good idea can go ahead and spread their wealth as they see fit, but I do have a problem with forcing others to do the same.
>Distributing money indiscriminately devalues work and effort.
This is a poor understanding of the concept. The idea behind a Basic Income Guarantee is that it is received equally by every citizen in the country. It's an idea linked to Negative Income Tax and other like proposals, and shares support of many with a more libertarian/economically conservative bent.
In most areas of North America where Basic Income experiments have occurred, the overall workforce does decline, but in very specific ways: mainly with single mothers and teenagers. Mothers choosing to stay at home with their children, and teenagers graduating high school are more positive impacts on the society at large than the greater retention of wealth by the highly motivated.
Wealth can only be created in societies, and therefore the overall health of a society should be of paramount concern to those interested in creating wealth. While I do not advocate for many socialist principles, a certain baseline ensures the society remains sustainable in the long term, thus allowing its members to grow wealth.
Both too much (Communism, socialist Europe) and too little (Argentina, Venezuala, the US) will lead to inevitable social collapse and the reduction of wealth (or the ability to create more) for all.
I apologise if a simple search should find this and I just such at searching, but I'm intrigued after your comment. There seems to be little information about the Manitoba experiment and what Alaska calls "Basic Income" doesn't seem consistent with what is being discussed. Where else in North America have people experimented with this?
run4yourlives: Well stated. Warren Buffet, I believe, has often emphasized the fact that the growing wealth disparity is not good for long-term economic growth in U.S.
So why should I want to subsidize single mothers? Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
I agree that there are some people who deserve financial support, but it should be up to the individual to decide who that is and how much they should receive.
This sort of economic blind spot is shockingly common, and presumably stems from the belief that economics is zero-sum. The idea behind subsidizing single mothers and keeping teens in school (which is the case that your parent comment was describing) is that the cost of this subsidy is theoretically lower than the expected cost of losing productive members of society or even worse, losing them to gang activity, which has further costs (single-parent households and high school dropouts are both _strongly_ linked to gang activity).
You may as well be saying "Why should I be paying taxes to put out a fire at the house down the street"? Well, if/when the fire spreads, you're going to be paying for it like it or not, so it seems like common sense to address the problem before the total cost is far higher.
The relationship between gang activity and dropout rates is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but given that "stopping gang activity" is damn near impossible through enforcement alone (this is basically the tactic we've been trying), it's strange that our culture is such that attacking the problem from the other side is anathema.
Don't forget the moral hazard. Women could choose to get a child instead of working. I personally don't think that it is a good idea to grow up in a family where no adult is gainfully employed.
These are complex issues and should be evaluated by each individual. You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy. If I was interested in reducing US crime and poverty, I'd donate to http://www.projectprevention.org/
>Women could choose to get a child instead of working.
This is a fallacy. A woman working is not going to "choose" this any more than you are going to go from being gainfully employed to sitting on your ass all day playing video games. Setting the right thresholds on both the income and the reductions removes any incentive to become a non-working drag on society. If however, you did make that choice, a basic income allows you to realize quickly how crap life is and then correct yourself, rather than slide further down the have not scale.
What's more, even if you did choose to sit around playing video games on $10K a year or whatever, you are fed and likely housed, and therefore not stealing from me, getting arrested and now costing me $75K a year in prison expenses.
> You have different criteria than I and should have every right to donate your income to causes you see as worthy
Taxation is not fucking charity. We do have every right to choose where our taxes go. They're called elections. However, considering (as I stated and you conveniently ignored) that your wealth was entirely derived from the society at large, the sustainable maintenance of said society is in your utmost interest, whether you think so or not. I have more interests than I can possibly afford to donate to. That's why I contribute to a collective fund and then hire managers to disperse said dollars with an eye to betterment of society as a whole.
>So why should I want to subsidize single mothers?
You aren't subsidizing anything. You are allowing the mother to raise their child with more options available to them. At the very least, it increases the chances of the child's success, and overall the chances that you are not paying for programs, prisons, social services in the future.
> Why should I disincentivize teenagers from gaining their first work experience?
Because they are "gaining that experience" instead of completing their schooling in many occurrences. I don't need to explain why it's a good idea to have as many people as possible stay in school, do I?
You need to educate yourself on the monetary system. Taxes do not necessarily fund government at the local level. Non-convertable floating fx monetary regimes are self-funding. Its kind of like saying where does the score-keeper at the basketball game get points to put on the score board ? Can he run out ?
Inflation is the constraint, not solvency. We need to find the right number between 0 and 10^10 but we are not trying to do that and so we're becoming like Japan.
Those same arguments could be made against welfare to an extent. The advantage of this system is that it would be simpler and therefor cheaper to administer and possibly harder to game.
Yes, but I also figure that anyone smart enough to effectively game the welfare system is smart enough to do substantially better than what even gamed welfare can provide.
Trust me, in the UK at least, you really don't need much to game the welfare system.
While the government is making gradual changes the requirements and checks for UK citizens to claim job seekers allowance week after week are laughable low compared to the rhetoric thrown around.
The other side of the coin is what do you do when there actually aren't jobs available in the region and there are too many people to effectively set up in self-employment? Making people jump through hoops and then frowning at their failings is fine when isolated to an individual, but at a demographic level it breaks down.
I recently spend five months out of work and unable to find a job and received welfare. I saw others like me playing the system. I saw others like me struggling to satisfy the system and more, applying for everything and getting rejections similarly. The system doesn't differentiate between the two.
To some degree it's the old 'where do you draw the line' - do you prefer to see the innocent suffer or the guilty go free?
The fundamental problem is separating the cheaters from those who really deserve help.
In a system where the individual can decide where to put the money, everybody can decide who is deserving of help.
If you mandate wealth redistribution, you need to create a complex ruleset that decides who is eligible. The rules are established by the ineffective and opaque processes of politics and government.
The resulting system is more complex, more expensive and easier to game.
With a basic income guarantee everyone would get money, and the same amount. There is no need to divine who needs it because everyone does. No matter the income.
What we are talking about are the basic necessities to a life in dignity. A roof over your head and enough to eat and clothe yourself, as well as enough to at least participate in society in some way (e.g. enough money to afford some sort of information gathering thingie, be it a newspaper subscription, TV or phone). The bare minimum.
I happen to believe that no one has the right to deny that anyone. It’s a basic human right. Every human deserves a life in dignity and there is no way to lose that. (And, I know, implementing that world wide right now is practically impossible. That, just like, e.g. any sort of restrictions of freedom of movement, labor, capital and goods, is a travesty but for the near future I’m hopeless about anything changing in that regard. It’s sad and unacceptable.)
Within that understanding of the world (and also the understanding that we won’t have work for everyone as time goes on) something like a guaranteed basic income seems at least like something worth trying out to me. (Many of the current welfare schemes seems broken to me, too focused on tight paranoid control and stigmatizing people.)
But then again, I’m European. (Also, not the person you were originally responding to.)
> There is no redistribution. Everyone is entitled to the same benefit, just like they are entitled to fire protection.
This type of thing (even when it involves fire protection) is redistribution. One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit -- even if it is the same set of people the distribution of the tax and the benefit aren't the same, and the difference is redistribution.
Note that I am not saying this is undesirable, merely that it clearly is redistribution.
>One set of people are taxed to pay for things, another set of people get the benefit
Ah, no. ALL people pay for things. How that payment occurs is a product of a progressive tax system in most cases, but there is no requirement that such a system exists to run service.
You wouldn't call a private security service employed by a gated community "wealth redistribution", would you? Although if they had an income driven progressive fee structure it would be.
But then wouldn't businesses who sell a lot of goods to people on the minimum income just put their prices up to force the gov to increase the minimum income at above inflation rates every year?
You also still have the problem of people like drug addicts who spend all of their minimum income on drugs/drink/gambling and are still left homeless.
I would imagine the smartest way to implement such a thing would be to index the amount of money to a basket of goods, much like the way in which inflation is calculated.
I think the problem would be with relatively inelastic things like housing. A landlord could easily just set their rates to 70% of minimum income and as other properties would be out of reach to those on minimum income there would be little competition. At that point you would get strong pressure to increase the minimum income or implement price controls.
We have had similar problems in the UK with private landlords renting out very poor quality housing at high prices to those on welfare. In the past we solving this by building lots of social housing.
I think a more sustainable way, if you want to implement a basic income, would be to have a low flat tax (say 10%) on all types of income, than divide the tax revenue across all citizens. That way everybody will cheer on the capitalists.
Wouldn't this cause inflation? The price of food, shelter, and basic needs is determined by peoples' ability to pay. I'd expect the price to rise until a percentage of people were unable to pay, again.
It would only cause monetary inflation if an equal amount of currency were not removed at the same time (through e.g. progressive taxation). Even if it did cause monetary inflation, that wouldn't necessarily lead to price inflation (depending e.g. on the slack in the economy). Even if there was price inflation it would likely not be uniform across goods and services.
In short, while it would be possible to design a self defeating basic income program it is not inevitable. That said, I prefer the employer of last resort scheme being pushed by the Australian MMT crowd.
The solution is simple. You simply give every adult citizen enough money every year to insure that they can afford food, shelter, and other basic needs. Give it to everyone, rich or poor, same amount. BAM! No more poverty, except in self-inflicted cases (drug addiction, for example), or things like severe and very expensive illness (which are covered by other means). This can be paid for in large part by the abolition of welfare systems, unemployment, Social Security, etc.
The stock criticism is that people wouldn't work, because they wouldn't have to. Frankly, I don't want such poorly motivated people working anyway, because they're not productive. And anyone who wants more than barely-poverty will get a job or start a business.
Another nice feature is that this supports people who want to do something productive but not financially valuable - charity work, ministry, art.