Where true basic income differs from this experiment by Canada is that true basic income should be for every adult, regardless of income, race, marital status, sexuality, etc. Not just for poor people, as with Mincome in this Canadian town.<p>A few arguments for:<p>1) It becomes a defacto emergency lifeline when a ostensibly middle class person loses their job or suffers an extremely expensive illness. In the US, it can take forever to get on disability. With true basic income, there's no need to worry about getting on disability, since you already have a basic income (and yes, this means that disability should be eliminated if this passes).<p>2) It becomes much less expensive to administer. No massive bureaucracy started up and growing larger just to weed out candidates for some shitty benefit. You're an adult person? Great, you're in!<p>3) When everyone gets it, it's much more politically feasible to start and maintain. No more questions of "them" doing this or "they" ripping off the hard working man.<p>4) It allows even healthy middle class people to take risks that might have a big payoff, such as starting up a new business, or embarking on a quest to invent some new technique. Or build an open source project!
Let's do some back of the envelope math here.<p>316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.<p>The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.<p>So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.<p>At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.<p>Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.<p>On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/</a>
Previous discussion of Mincome, prompted by a different article: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192</a>
I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping.<p>Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level.<p>$20m/year plus administrative costs, let's say $5m. $25m for the experiment. Say we run it for a guarantee of 5 years, so that is $125 million.<p>Too bad. A bit beyond a kickstarter level.<p>Maybe somebody could supplement it with a reality show.
I don't understand the notion regarding feedback from participants in the experiment. Evelyn Forget said that opinions from respondents may skew positive because those with negative experiences would be less likely to reach out to her. I was under the impression that consumers with negative experiences provide feedback far more often than satisfied consumers. Has that been debunked or am I missing some factor?
Can someone explain to me how basic income could work? I'm really interested, not trying to start a battle. The biggest question: Where does the money come from? Massive taxes on the wealthy? You can't just pull a salary for everyone out of thin air. In the case of this town in Canada, the project was probably funded by taxes from other parts of the country, and could not have worked universally.