Then they adjust.

I think the point of BI is to keep you from starving. The idea is that no matter who you are or what your station is in society, you should be able to afford food, a roof over your head, and basic medical care. It's not to maintain your social standing in life - someone who has a job will rightfully have a higher standard of living than someone who doesn't. And you shouldn't expect it to be a comfortable middle class existence, you should expect it to involve living like the working poor today - a cramped apartment, not much in luxuries, public transportation or long commutes.

But it takes the stress out of simply existing. The idea is that it's set at a level where you're not going to die, you're not going to end up homeless, you're just not going to be very comfortable.

As for how it's different from welfare/social security/disability - I usually see it pitched as a way of unifying all of those (and the EITC), so that people don't fall through the cracks because they don't know how to sign up or what they're entitled to. It'd save on administration costs as well.

If BI happens, there will be an entire art form developed on how to live happily on $15k/adult/year. This is already taking place (e.g. Mr. Money Mustache lives a comfortable middle-class livestyle with his wife and son on $27k/year).

I consider this a good thing.

The other main benefit of BI over the current patchwork of welfare programs is that it removes the disincentive to work on the margin. Today, many unskilled people stand to lose money by getting a job, because the value of their labor is so low that the loss of benefits they'd trigger by becoming employed would actually be more significant than the amount of money they'd make from any job for which they can actually qualify.

This is a stupid state of affairs, because: (1) it wastes the potential labor of such people (which is, after all, generally worth something); (2) it robs them of the psychological benefits of being gainfully employed; and (3) it disincentivizes them from gaining the practice in work and thereby developing the skills that would allow them to get better jobs in the future.

BI fixes these problems by making sure that everyone, even at the bottom, sees positive economic return for their labor.

From a social dynamics standpoint, I suspect that over the long run, this feature is probably even more valuable than the "keep you from starving" features of BI.

Critically, excellent education has to be included in that as well. It's not enough to just take care of bodily needs -- you have to provide a way up, too.

Not an American, but from what I understand from hearing this argument here multiple times...

1. It is cheaper to just hand over USD$1K per month to anyone that bothers to show up at the BI office than to support an army of social workers and bureaucrats to sort out who's worthy of welfare and who's just lazy.

2. It is more fair to just hand over USD$1K of BI to anyone who asks because bureaucrats are not quite good at sorting out who's worthy anyways. Under current system people with genuine dire needs fall through the cracks while the benefits of welfare goes to those who take the time to learn and game the system.

3. BI is in the long term more productive for the whole economy because it can be used to complement/subsidize low income for unskilled workers, while welfare eligibility rules prevent receivers from bootstrapping out of poverty if they cannot find entry level jobs that pay at least as much as what multiple welfare programs already provide.

> It is cheaper to just hand over USD$1K per month to anyone that bothers to show up at the BI office than to support an army of social workers and bureaucrats

Your worst case scenario under this program is 300,000,000 Americans showing up during a downturn in the economy. That's $300 billion a month, $3.6 trillion a year, or roughly 100% of current US budget expenditure (with entitlement, defense, discretionary, etc.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#Ma...

So it's definitely not cheaper, even when you account for the cost of maintaining the bureaucracy.

US government expenditure is more than $6.3 trillion. The $3.6 trillion you quoted is just federal spending, and does not include state and local spending:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total

So, it's more like 50-something percent, not 100%. Also, some of the money would come back as sales tax etc., so the real impact would be less than 50%.

At the height of the great depression only ~23% of workers were out of jobs. That's hardly 100% during a "downturn." At 100% unemployment do you really think our current system of privately owned property would fare any better? Personally I think at 100% unemployment the masses would seize all the property, and probably rightfully so.

So are you inserting a qualification for being unemployed and no longer allowing just anybody to walk in and demand their share of basic income?

Then you're back to the problem of needing to hire more bureaucracy with respective office leases, equipment, etc., to verify the employment status.

Unemployment is also a weak estimate, what you want is unemployment + the negative labor force participation - kids and retirees are not unemployed in the sense that they're actively seeking employment, but would probably not pass up an opportunity for free cash.

BI is typically given to everyone as a basic right - including those with jobs.

>That's $300 billion a month, $36 trillion a year

Math error here.

Thanks, corrected.

> In other words, what good is $15k/year when you've been living on $15k/month? Or $7k or $5k/month?

Not much I guess, but if they're suddenly faced with the prospect of existing on $0/year, I imagine it'd look pretty nice. Quite a lot of people live on 15K per person in the family, so I don't think they'd be hopeless. I think BI is supposed to hit a sweet spot akin to the "better than a sharp stick" thing you mention. You could live off it if you really wanted to, but it'd kind of suck, and your life overall would be more enjoyable with a job.

I think a lot of the appeal of BI comes from two ideas. One: automation technology possibly introducing a "new normal" in terms of unemployment levels, in which case BI might help a society not eat itself. Two: it may, possibly, be much more efficient than the various welfare programs you mention. I don't think that's been proven, but it's a tantalizing idea.

I'm not really an expert on the idea though, so, two cents.

edit - I'm also not sure that automation tech introducing sweeping society-damning joblessness is something that will ever actually happen.

A few thoughts

1) even if a basic income disproportionately helps the otherwise low-income part of society, it seems more "fair". Instead of calling it welfare or charity, with the implication that those who receive it are living off the backs of others, and are themselves lazy, it's just something everyone receives.

2) If the hypothetical couple's total expenses are $15k/month, and they can't gear down their lifestyle to $5k/month before running out of savings, I'd propose they weren't really living responsibly. $5k/month is enough to subsist, albiet not luxuriously, in pretty much any part of the U.S.

The alternative is going from $15k/mo. to $0/mo. That extra $5k could either keep a family solvent.

3) even if it merely delays the inevitable, that might be good enough. If expenses are absolutely fixed, but if a basic income allows a person 12 months to find/create a new job in a rough economy, instead of 6, or 3 or none, that's likely to be a success.

BI would be roughly $1k, not 5.

> but it's just delaying the inevitable

What do you see as the inevitable? It wouldn't prevent them from losing something, but it would be the difference between the bottom being living under a bridge completely destitute and living in a shabby apartment until they got back on their feet.

As far as the low-income side of things, the safety nets you mention definitely help many people, but in the US at least there are still many other people who do not qualify for existing programs, but are still very much in need:

- Long-term unemployment - unemployment pay, even with the recent extensions, is limited in duration. A portion of such people might qualify just fine for disability (SSDI, SSI), but many long-term unemployed do not. To qualify a person can't just prove they haven't been able to find any available jobs they're capable of doing, but prove that there isn't any possible job at all they could do, regardless of openings or likelihood of being hired.

There is disability fraud that goes on (cases that don't meet the legal definition, but are misrepresented and approved), especially for areas with very high unemployment, but this is illegal and not supposed to happen, and efforts are constantly underway to crack down, often to the detriment of many unequivocally legitimate (by legal definition) disability recipients.

- For food assistance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), provides usually $100-$300 per person in monthly supplemental assistance for purchasing groceries. But for those people without additional income to put towards food, it is often not enough and seeking out additional non-governmental help is necessary to not go hungry. In many states long-term unemployed people, regardless of need, do not even qualify (assistance is time-limited).

- Except in the case of low-income parents, cash assistance is very rare or nonexistent most places in the US.

- Health care - the Affordable Care Act (ACA) improved the situation for a large portion of uninsured Americans, mostly by providing variable subsidies for a wide range of incomes, and disallowing insurance companies from denying or cancelling coverage for medical reasons.

Even now though, in some states many low income-people still cannot obtain insurance; some State governments (like Texas, Florida and others) chose not to expand their Medicaid programs to cover all adults below the poverty level, as was expected. In those states non-disabled adults below the poverty level do not qualify for Medicaid, or even for the same subsidies provided to those in higher income brackets.

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A basic income would ease a lot of pains for low-income individuals who do not qualify for current aid programs, or qualify but do not receive benefits for various other reasons: like not knowing it's available, daunting paperwork and proof of identity/need requirements, stigma, etc. The bureaucratic overhead of processing applications and managing current cases for a range of programs would be greatly reduced too.