This is something that people against basic income fail to acknowledge, that basic income is not a strict expense. It is redistribution. You cannot just line item it as a tax expense because if you implement it properly (automated, no bureaucracy, no middle men - best done by detaching the funding and payout) you are effectively adding your 1k or whatever a month per person right back into the economy.
And for most people, the stimulus of spending 1k vastly eclipses the recession of a billionaire losing 1k. The market pressure of demand by those who had none would generate so much economic growth it offsets a huge portion of the tax "cost" of basic income.
The real cost is not the figure in how much you take to give back. It is the opportunity cost - how much potential growth is lost depressing the rich in relation to how much growth is generated stimulating the poor.
And almost every economic report in history shows that is always a positive correlation. That the richer and more equal you make a society the more prosperous it is.
I think HN is a great reflection of that. SV is awash in venture capital, people are getting millions thrown at the most stupid ideas, because we are economically out of sync in this country, where the elites have too much and the masses have too little. This means that the rich are throwing money at random at things hoping to find new ways to get money out of the masses, but when the masses have so little they generate so little market pressure its impossible to gage what they want.
Likewise, you could have the inverse problem - where the masses have huge demand for things, but there is no venture capital left to kickstart meeting that demand. But honestly that sounds completely ridiculous today - in the age of the Internet I see no reason a wholly wealth-equal society could not just kickstart their own VC, because the only difference between one million people giving a dollar and one person giving a million dollars is the immediacy of your responsibility - your VC backer today is a lot more personal than a million funders, but I think Kickstarter and similar projects have shown how the model and work and fail.
But yes, if you talk about universal basic income / citizens dividend / negative income tax / etc in the wrong way, you will trigger all these culturally instinctual emotional responses in people against it.
But it is not like the military, or medicare (or NHS), where pretty much that "cost" is the cost. You spend money on something and hope for the benefits - non-monetary - to outweigh the expenses. In the later case you are hoping that taking care of your people is worth it over making them fend for themselves, but you are actually paying that bill with tax dollars.
Meanwhile, other projects like social security and UBI are just monetary redistribution. SS is much more inefficient than a well implemented UBI, but a huge portion of the money going into that program is redistribution. So you cannot talk about them as these black hole money traps when they are not, unless of course you are the opponent to their implementation.
And for most people, the stimulus of spending 1k vastly eclipses the recession of a billionaire losing 1k. The market pressure of demand by those who had none would generate so much economic growth it offsets a huge portion of the tax "cost" of basic income.
The real cost is not the figure in how much you take to give back. It is the opportunity cost - how much potential growth is lost depressing the rich in relation to how much growth is generated stimulating the poor.
And almost every economic report in history shows that is always a positive correlation. That the richer and more equal you make a society the more prosperous it is.
I think HN is a great reflection of that. SV is awash in venture capital, people are getting millions thrown at the most stupid ideas, because we are economically out of sync in this country, where the elites have too much and the masses have too little. This means that the rich are throwing money at random at things hoping to find new ways to get money out of the masses, but when the masses have so little they generate so little market pressure its impossible to gage what they want.
Likewise, you could have the inverse problem - where the masses have huge demand for things, but there is no venture capital left to kickstart meeting that demand. But honestly that sounds completely ridiculous today - in the age of the Internet I see no reason a wholly wealth-equal society could not just kickstart their own VC, because the only difference between one million people giving a dollar and one person giving a million dollars is the immediacy of your responsibility - your VC backer today is a lot more personal than a million funders, but I think Kickstarter and similar projects have shown how the model and work and fail.
But yes, if you talk about universal basic income / citizens dividend / negative income tax / etc in the wrong way, you will trigger all these culturally instinctual emotional responses in people against it.
But it is not like the military, or medicare (or NHS), where pretty much that "cost" is the cost. You spend money on something and hope for the benefits - non-monetary - to outweigh the expenses. In the later case you are hoping that taking care of your people is worth it over making them fend for themselves, but you are actually paying that bill with tax dollars.
Meanwhile, other projects like social security and UBI are just monetary redistribution. SS is much more inefficient than a well implemented UBI, but a huge portion of the money going into that program is redistribution. So you cannot talk about them as these black hole money traps when they are not, unless of course you are the opponent to their implementation.