Timeline for Will basic income necessarily be a government initiative?
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| Dec 11, 2021 at 20:45 | history | edited | Rick Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 8, 2016 at 10:48 | comment | added | michaeljt | I know this is slightly off-topic, but I do wonder whether a BI needs to be enough to live off to be of value. While no one could stop working for a BI of say $50/month (is that a problem?), I could imagine that a regular BI of that amount, every month (i.e. accumulating over time), might make a difference in quite a few critical situations. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 17:17 | comment | added | Aaa | Tyler, I think with basic income it is usually understood that money is transferred from one point to another. As Philipp mentioned, the conventional idea is for government to provide this benefit through tax revenue. So there is no "infinite money" at play. I am fairly certain that printing money for basic income is a recipe for disaster, and that it is not something being considered by any serious participant in the basic income debate. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 16:46 | comment | added | Tyler | And you might want to consider the administration overhead of the government. To give $1000 to each of the 300M Americans each month, with 0 efficiency, that would take $300B per month. Adjusted for 70% waste, you need $1T per month. That's $12T/year or about 2.5 the entire tax revenue of 2012. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 16:41 | comment | added | Tyler | With infinite money, money becomes worthless. And that $316B voluntary charity was on top of $4.9T involuntary "charity" to the state. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 13:16 | comment | added | Philipp♦ | @Alexander Development aid which comes in form of non-earmarked funds from one country to another is a completely different topic with various other aspects to consider. It can cause more problems than it solves, like not helping the domestic economy and instead making the receiver even more reliant on imports. But this topic is far too large in scope to handle with a comment. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 13:03 | comment | added | Alexander | While it is not possible to ask the Americans to donate fair "basic income" for all Americans, I guess that their donations could provide a basic income for everyone in a smaller country like Canada, or one with lower cost of living, like Nigeria, Indonesia or perhaps even India. There are many people in the world for whom having an additional $83 per month makes the difference between starvation and affluence! | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 12:06 | comment | added | Philipp♦ | @AdriaanJoubert ...or maybe it would be just more cost-effective for the group of ultra-rich philanthropists when they would just invest those trillions of dollar into political lobbying to get the government to do it for them. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 11:55 | comment | added | Philipp♦ | @AdriaanJoubert With infinite money, almost any problem becomes solvable. One problem I could see is obtaining a complete list of all citizens and their bank details. Such personal information is hard to obtain in a legal way. However, they could just ask people through lots of advertisement to register themselves. Few people would say no to receiving free money with no strings attached. One minor problem would be that the basic income would likely not be tax-exempt, but that's another problem which can be dealt with by throwing more money at it. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 11:52 | comment | added | Aaa | Thank you for the considered response. I would have given you an upvote, but I don't have enough reputation to do so. I am going to keep the question open for a while to get more responses. I suppose funding a hypothetical NGO to provide a basic income is the most obvious issue - but let us suppose (for argument's sake) a group of philanthoripists leave enough money so that this is no longer an issue. What other things need to be considered if an NGO were to provide a basic income? Is there anything else that would make such a system fail if funding were not an issue? | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 10:38 | history | edited | Philipp♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 21, 2014 at 10:28 | history | edited | Philipp♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 21, 2014 at 10:22 | history | answered | Philipp♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |