> What are we working towards again?

Having a worldwide population of more than 10000 people ?

What I don't get about basic income is the incentives this would bring, which invalidate the whole thing. It's not a Nash equilibrium. What this would create is a huge class of 100% dependent people who have no power, entitlement and are in a very unfair relationship (to their advantage) with the rest of humanity (by current standards).

The productive group will hate the basic income receivers because they "steal" money. And the basic income receivers will hate the productive group because they'll be the ones constantly saying "no you can't have any more", "no we can't do that", "no we can't save your little girl by dedicated 50 medical personnel to just her", "no no no no no no" ... And while I don't believe in Ayn Rand, I do believe that the productive group can leave.

This will bring tensions and hate between the productive side of the population, which will be only a few, and the rest. The government, of course, will be in the pocket of the productive side, because they represent (and control to some extent) the limits of what is realistically/economically possible. The smaller the productive group, the more clout they'll have.

Eventually they will get rid of the basic income receivers.

That's not the case though because THEY are basic income receivers too -- EVERYONE receives even the 1% and elites. That's one thing that makes it better than current welfare. People on welfare KNOW they're 'leeches' and with that comes a stigma of being a trashy person because you can't get enough jobs to supply enough income for your family.

Take away welfare, give everyone the same amount monthly, and it's a citizenship 'right' or contract for being a good citizen of the United States. The only stipulation is you HAVE to have a physical address to mail the checks to -- meaning if you still for some reason want to be homeless even w/ the added income then you're sol. The goal should be 100% end to starvation and homelessness.

On top of that it spurs growth of the economy. When robots do take over and 50% are unemployed -- who will shop at walmart, or amazon? Absolutely nobody. The money will still flow up to the 1% in droves, for the absolute necessities, but eventually even that will drip dry. Give money to the poorer people though and they end up spending 100% of whatever they make usually.

This goes right back to the Walton's most likely, but it increases economic power, and gdp. I also think if you give everyone enough to be across the poverty line, then we could move to a flat SALES tax over income which would have lower tax for legal citizens / etc and more for those who are undocumented, or travelling through the states. Then we could alter and adjust the national sales tax every year or so based on whether we have a surplus or deficit. We can also do away w/ the IRS completely and end more bureacracy.

Perhaps I chose my words poorly, and we'll call them net-tax-payers and net-tax-receivers instead. The people involved will be pretty aware of which situation they're in.

Besides, total social spending in the US is about 2.5 trillion dollars, or about $650/person/month. That's what basic income would realistically pay (assuming illegal immigrants get nothing, otherwise it'd be $630). The flip side of this would be to kill all government support programs. No more Obamacare, no more social security, no more veteran pensions, nothing like that. All replaced by that pitiful amount.

Good luck paying cancer treatments from that. Hell, good luck paying getting bandaged after a simple scratch from a fall for that amount. If you don't cover medical insurance, then of course it would have to be less (to be exact it would be $360 per month per person).

Now you could say cancer treatments will become cheaper. And sure enough they will. However, even Martin Shkreli worked with a profit margin of around 30%. So ... if you make the treatments more than 30% cheaper (assuming all of pharma is as much of a scumbag as he is, which it isn't, 10% is more common), you can say goodbye to improvements. They won't happen. For quite a few treatments there is an actual reason to be that expensive (e.g. paying for a surgeon's training, 10 years of living, ... and then having them operate, with a staff of 5 each trained for 5 years, in an impeccably clean room, fresh expensive equipment that mostly gets thrown away after one use because it's just too risky otherwise, ... Oh, and don't forget : you replaced most spending with basic income, so you can't just fund that as well. This would have to be funded from that $650/person/month). You'd also have to accept market forces. You live in a town with less than 52 cancer patients per year ? (assuming 1 treatment takes about a week of work) No cancer treatment for you without long traveling, not included, of course, in the price.

You cannot just legislate your way out of economic problems. It doesn't work. When law fights economics, economics wins, and the whole country suffers. See the many attempts at doing it anyway, e.g. in Venezuela most recently. Or to put it another way: basic income will not stop the poor from suffering. Only having them do something useful enough to give them a good life will.

The incentive to make money and be rewarded for work is still there.

Regarding the unfairness concern, this is why I prefer rebranding it as a citizen's dividend funded by a land value tax. See my other comment in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141203 . Essentially this makes it morally justifiable. Not to mention our system is already unfair in that rentiers profit off the earth's land, and rich people don't have to work.

We're already seeing the same tensions due to automation reducing the number and quality of jobs. We have a 1% class that have orders of magnitude more than what everyone else has while the plebeians barely scrape by and can't find steady, quality, decent paying work. Basic income is the solution to reducing this tension. Another option would be guaranteeing jobs, but I think that would be extraordinarily inefficient, and it perpetuates this notion that people without money have to work for people with money to justify their existence.

We're already highly dependent on each other. Chances are you work in an office and aren't growing your own food, building your own homes, maintaining your own plumbing, building your own cars, manufacturing your own products, and so on. Basic income just says that we have enough wealth to go around and we're all shareholders of this land, so here's your dividend for permitting others monopoly ownership of our land and its resources. It also says that in an advanced enough society, nobody should starve and go homeless.

Without a basic income, mass job automation and extreme income inequality will lead to a French Revolution.