> First, only the people making up to the amount of the basic income would be willing to quit their jobs- anyone making more than needed to survive would certainly continue wanting to maximize their earnings
You've made two assumptions here:
1. People are ENTIRELY rational (they're not)
2. No black market exists
If you could guarantee that those conditions could be met, I would be much more willing to engage in the rest of your comment further. But they can't be met, not even close.
In order to be useful the basic income has to be a substantial fraction of the median income, or else you can't really argue that it's basic. If receiving it means that you're still in poverty by a wide margin I don't think it's useful enough to talk seriously about.
But once it's a substantial fraction of the median income, working looks less and less attractive. What I mean is that say $2000 for 0 hours worked in a month is very nice, and $2020 for 1 hour worked is at least in percentages, infinitely less desirable. Perhaps once you get up to 30 hours per week worked and $4400 in income you're starting to see some benefits from working in some kind of a meaningful way.
The issue is that working has both a fixed amount of hassle and a marginal amount of hassle. Once you don't need to work to eat, now you're just doing gut-feeling comparisons of hassle/reward ratios. On days that I have to work I have to get out of bed, get dressed, commute, etc. That's a fair amount of hassle. There's also the marginal hassle of being at work and not getting to do exactly what I want.
It wouldn't be worth it to do all the fixed overhead hassle to only work a hour a day because that would make such a small different in the total monthly income. So that leaves people wanting/needing to work more, probably at least a 4-6 hour day to amortize the fixed overhead of hassle into a reasonable number of hours to make the total amount of hassle substantially less than the money received so that working makes sense.
So now that lots of people aren't willing to do low skill, low pay jobs the pay obviously would have to go up. But that means that prices are also going to go up. And that means that the basic income isn't basic anymore; it means that it's sub-basic since it can't provide for your basic needs. That then requires a bigger basic income, which leads to higher prices, which leads to higher basic income, until you've got at least the potential to have a zimbabwe-style hyperinflation.
"Crucial to both components is discipline over the creation of additional money. However, the Mugabe government was printing money to finance involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, in 2000, in the Second Congo War, including higher salaries for army and government officials." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
Once those people (government officials and army) got more money and started to spend it, everyone started to realize that the money was not worth as much as they thought it was. That led to prices going up, which led to more money printing to keep salaries ahead of the curve and this spiraled out of control very quickly.
Granted there's no guarantee that a similar kind of runaway would happen under the basic income. But it's definitely a very real risk.
EDIT: I forgot to touch on the black market. If a person wants to accumulate income it might be better to do so on the black market. That allows a person to avoid high taxes (basic income has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is always proposed to be higher taxes). That makes the black market (or working "under the table") attractive. The shadow economy of Europe is already by one estimate 17% of the total economy. Basic income would further encourage such things: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-econo...
Are US salaries anything near a big part of the economy? I thought the 99% controlled most of the money. Its unlikely that fiddling around with salaries (even minting money to pay a basic income) will affect the value of money, if we're only talking about 1% (or less) of the money.
Your question is really confused. The top 1% hold a lot of wealth but not all that much purchasing power. Everyone else has relatively speaking a lot of purchasing power even if the wealth is less.
In other words, there is one guy with $1mm in the bank and 99 people that make $50k per year. Which is more important to you if you make and sell stuff?
The guy with $1mm in the bank could theoretically buy $1mm worth of your stuff but after that he'd be out of money. The 99 people who make $50k a year collectively could buy just under $5mm of stuff EVERY YEAR. So while the guy with $1mm has more power from any one instant to another, everyone else has a lot more power over any longer time-scale.
Not about purchasing power. About the value of money. That's not gonna change by fooling with 1% of the availability.
The reason so many are unemployed, after all, is that it takes fewer people to sustain a given 'standard of living', right? So now, with our free market, those unemployed drop into poverty since their bank account of imaginary points goes to zero.
Put points back into those bank accounts, and what happens? Those small tallys are not going to affect what the big folks are doing with all those trillions.
> Not about purchasing power. About the value of money.
The value of money is directly derived from its purchasing power. If you can't buy anything with money, it's worthless.
The point is that the vast majority of the money in the US is in flow, not tied up in the rich 1% bank accounts.
So if 95% of people suddenly have 2x cashflow (on average, let's say) then prices should roughly double within a fairly short period of time. We won't suddenly have more gasoline or milk or beef or whatever if everyone has twice as much money every month. So more money chases the same amount of goods and prices rise. This is really simple economics.
Would doubling the price of everything erode the purchasing power of the rich too? Yeah, absolutely. At least for all the money that they have tied up in cash. But considering that the FDIC only insures you up to $250k I suspect that most wealthy people are going to have their money in assets like stocks, bonds, and real estate. Real estate prices will definitely rise and I suspect that the other asset classes will go up in price too.
There might be a period of a few weeks to a couple of years where people actually do get more stuff before the prices start to rise. But with how just-in-timed everyone's supply chains are these days it's not as though it would take 20 years for everyone to catch up to what's happened.
That's all classical economics, but it assumes people spending money is the whole economy. These days, it isn't. We're a pimple on the spreadsheet of America.
>In order to be useful the basic income has to be a substantial fraction of the median income
Woah thats a pretty crazy assumption - basic income only needs to provide enough income for basic needs to be useful - are you trying to say that the median salary in the US is the bare minimum to meet necessities?
Median income is the amount which divides the income distribution into two equal groups, half having income above that amount[1]
currently the median household income is estimated to be $51,371 - if you think that this is the MINIMUM amount of basic income for the program to be useful then its clear you have a core misunderstanding of basic income at its core.
>What I mean is that say $2000 for 0 hours worked in a month is very nice, and $2020 for 1 hour worked is at least in percentages, infinitely less desirable.
You say that people are not entirely rational at the beginning of your comment, yet you are now assuming they are - many people enjoy work, do you think PG only does ycombinator purely for the money? warren buffet? does tom cruise still act only for the paychecks?
Also, you are missing another key point of my last comment, and that is that the price of labor will rise. I agree that working for 20 extra dollars isnt going to seem as worth it when you already have enough to serve your needs - that is the whole point. wages will rise, people will be choosier about what work they are willing to do, and the less desirable jobs will have to pay more - that is how simple supply and demand work
>EDIT: I forgot to touch on the black market. If a person wants to accumulate income it might be better to do so on the black market. That allows a person to avoid high taxes (basic income has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is always proposed to be higher taxes). That makes the black market (or working "under the table") attractive. The shadow economy of Europe is already by one estimate 17% of the total economy. Basic income would further encourage such things:
First, you are somehow overlooking that the incentive to work under the table is already there, yet the vast majority of workers do not get paid cash under the table - it is in both the employer and employees interest to subvert the tax system for wages already yet this isnt happening - what makes you believe that this would so dramatically change that MOST of the labor market chooses this option?
This is to ignore that fact that there are regulatory bodies that actually enforce this, and will go to job centers to make sure employees are being payed legally - this happens all the time and is a common method is trying to find illegal aliens (I have years of experience cooking in restaurants where i have seen this first hand many times)
When I stated "substantial fraction" I guess what I mean is that it's at least 20% or 40% or something. A basic income of 5% of median personal or household income is going to be little more than a sick joke. Note I didn't say "exactly the same as" but rather "a substantial fraction"
To compare people who make millions of dollars a year to people who are eking out subsistence wages is a mistake I think. These people tend to be highly motivated and thus for them it's often not strictly about the money anyhow, but the money sure is nice as it affords them the ability to work on the thing they're passionate about. When you're making $9/hr at mcdonalds I suspect that passion has less to do with it and a need to eat and have shelter is a bigger factor.
The higher taxes go, the more incentive there is to work under the table. I don't know if the black market in the US is bigger than in Europe, but I can tell you that in the US taxes are lower and so there's less incentive. I agree that policing can do a fair amount, but what if you push people into entirely invisible jobs? It doesn't have to change MOST of the labor market, but if right now the black market is 10% of GDP and the taxes rise enough to push it to 15% or 20% then you're growing crime. I don't think that's a good outcome.
Now a great question to ask is which is worse? Would it be worse to raise crime and have a basic income? I don't know. Trying to think about the unintended consequences of policies is really hard, so few do it. I think that's part of the reason our laws tend to be so full of obvious loopholes.
You've made two assumptions here:
1. People are ENTIRELY rational (they're not)
2. No black market exists
If you could guarantee that those conditions could be met, I would be much more willing to engage in the rest of your comment further. But they can't be met, not even close.
In order to be useful the basic income has to be a substantial fraction of the median income, or else you can't really argue that it's basic. If receiving it means that you're still in poverty by a wide margin I don't think it's useful enough to talk seriously about.
But once it's a substantial fraction of the median income, working looks less and less attractive. What I mean is that say $2000 for 0 hours worked in a month is very nice, and $2020 for 1 hour worked is at least in percentages, infinitely less desirable. Perhaps once you get up to 30 hours per week worked and $4400 in income you're starting to see some benefits from working in some kind of a meaningful way.
The issue is that working has both a fixed amount of hassle and a marginal amount of hassle. Once you don't need to work to eat, now you're just doing gut-feeling comparisons of hassle/reward ratios. On days that I have to work I have to get out of bed, get dressed, commute, etc. That's a fair amount of hassle. There's also the marginal hassle of being at work and not getting to do exactly what I want.
It wouldn't be worth it to do all the fixed overhead hassle to only work a hour a day because that would make such a small different in the total monthly income. So that leaves people wanting/needing to work more, probably at least a 4-6 hour day to amortize the fixed overhead of hassle into a reasonable number of hours to make the total amount of hassle substantially less than the money received so that working makes sense.
So now that lots of people aren't willing to do low skill, low pay jobs the pay obviously would have to go up. But that means that prices are also going to go up. And that means that the basic income isn't basic anymore; it means that it's sub-basic since it can't provide for your basic needs. That then requires a bigger basic income, which leads to higher prices, which leads to higher basic income, until you've got at least the potential to have a zimbabwe-style hyperinflation.
"Crucial to both components is discipline over the creation of additional money. However, the Mugabe government was printing money to finance involvement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, in 2000, in the Second Congo War, including higher salaries for army and government officials." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
Once those people (government officials and army) got more money and started to spend it, everyone started to realize that the money was not worth as much as they thought it was. That led to prices going up, which led to more money printing to keep salaries ahead of the curve and this spiraled out of control very quickly.
Granted there's no guarantee that a similar kind of runaway would happen under the basic income. But it's definitely a very real risk.
EDIT: I forgot to touch on the black market. If a person wants to accumulate income it might be better to do so on the black market. That allows a person to avoid high taxes (basic income has to come from somewhere, that somewhere is always proposed to be higher taxes). That makes the black market (or working "under the table") attractive. The shadow economy of Europe is already by one estimate 17% of the total economy. Basic income would further encourage such things: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/salman-sakir/black-market-econo...