Also https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-basic-income-stud... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037226, but we merged the comments hither)

Yes, poor tend to be unable to retain money, they spend. Spending means someone else get money from them. So those with a basic income can spend more, making local economy a bit better and still making their life a bit better.

Remember a neglect thing: money are unit of measure of various substrate, not a value per se. Exchanging money means moving something else.

After seeing the system in use, I think it would be best if general relief type programs like you have in California, do not allow cash withdrawals. It is a factor in the ongoing fentanyl crisis. The pattern of behavior is enabled by the free cash.

Instead a debit card that can be used anywhere except for cash is ideal. While many use the money for necessary things this is a factor in what is seen in inner cities.

And also that if it was only given to some at a sliding scale, it is not universal.

It seems that more affluent are way more irresponsible with their money than poorer people.

Forget Universal Basic Income, give me Universal Basic Housing.

No US citizen should be homeless, or feel like they could become homeless if they lose their job.

It's like those flat-earth people who did that experiment with the extremely sensitive gyroscope that proved that the earth was rotating and spherical; and were caught on recording saying "well, we clearly cannot accept that" and I think eventually simply deliberately ignored and suppressed it from their minds.

Do not ever underestimate certain human's capacity for self-delusion.

The bigger problem though is that this UBI cult is very authoritarian and tyrannical at its core, consistently increasing the insistence that they must take and use ever increasing amounts of other people's money to prove that UBI works, coincidentally making the researchers and the common NGO types scam artist operatives huge amounts of money in the process.

UBI is simply a con job, a fraud, a lie, theft, and even slavery ... theft of resources and services against their will and under threat of violence and harm in order to support the lives and livelihoods of others.

You want UBI? Great, sign up to have your income taxed to pay for it.

It wasn't like that earlier, but at some point all the farmer families' wives applied for unemployment benefits...

My current lens is that UBI ultimately inflates prices leaving everyone back where they were before. The problem with openresarchlab's test is it's limited scope. It did increase the spending power of a particular group because the prices around them did not increase.

If everyone has more money the "open market" raises prices to simply meet that. The root problem is non-limited capitalism? The price of basic goods cannot be allowed to rise vs cash on hand.

I do believe UBI's ultimate goal is to increase "spending power", but simply giving money doesn't change the problem long term and thus UBI is doomed to fail in its current form.

Why does this group of people that are not historically known for their generosity or their sympathy for the unworking poor suddenly want to give everyone a little bit of money for nothing?

In my mind, it is to create a permanent underclass. A group of people with just enough money to survive but not enough to participate in the world of the elites (or even the middle class). This underclass will represent a massive user base for the products and services that the VC class wants to sell. And they’ll be stuck there, and easier to target than ever.

My boomer dad got a job right out of high school, with only a diploma, and was able to purchase a house and support my then-stay-at-home mother within 3 months of starting work. That is simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have jobs.

Your comment sure sounds like mind-reading.

Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least?

> However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate

Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions.

I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.

This worked as long as the machine was unquestioned and there were contractors willing to play ball to finance the whole thing. Now as a series of court decisions limiting the spoils system and incompetent successors have weakened the system, the mayor's approval rating is half of what it once was and overall confidence in the city is much lower. And the city's finances are about as bad as they can get today. So I wouldn't call it socialism and I wouldn't even say that it's worse than the alternatives.

Having an hour less in the work week should be balanced against being productive for longer.

But I do not like the notion of "more equitable society" at all. I do not think it is fair or useful.

For one, some people have extraordinary abilities, and will be pissed off if, in exchange for their extraordinary contributions, they only got the income "according to their needs", as defined by government. This basically takes away all the motivation to excel at something.

Also, the masses would be discontent because their perceived "needs" are much bigger that their actual ability to produce anything. This is partially remedied by capitalism, where the "greedy capitalist" basically forces them to work harder than they would out of their own free will.

If A is making $1001 and B is making $2000, A has to survive on 33% of what the economy produces.

Even if inflation could be exclusive to basic needs, causing A’s costs and B’s costs to both rise by $1000, the economy now heavily incentivizes more competition around satisfying basic needs. All rent going up equally regardless of unit size means it’s time to start building or converting luxury apartments to multiple low income apartments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

granted this doesn't work for all goods, such as housing, but even then you would be better of with it just working for some goods.

I don't have a pat answer to your concerns, but I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it? Unless there's rent control it's allowed. The classic "efficient markets" answer is that providing housing does have underlying costs and, though people having more money does tend to lead prices to go up, sellers are still competing for buyers. At least historically, even in boom economic times, housing costs did not 100% stay even with rising incomes (which is just what this is).

That said, us housing has been getting worse for most people for a long time. House costs have outpaced inflation for 60 years[1]. Rents are even worse[2]. Reporting suggests this is now being made worse by highly concentrated rental conglomerates[3]. That is to say that the cost of these services is not tied to how much money people have to pay for them - your scenario where landlords just raise prices to new income levels is actually optimistic. There's also practical evidence that local factors and competition will lead prices to go down under "the right" local conditions[4].

So I think my answer is that your concern is based on an idealized economic model, but the actual trends US in housing haven't really been following the economic ideal for some time. I don't think all gains from UBI would be snapped up by raising prices, but like all inflation we'd lose some! Overall, to me, the weakness here is that the study doesn't show that many benefits for a ~40% (!!) increase in income. Which seems WILD. Just not what you would expect at all.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/why-home-prices-have-risen-f...

[2] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/

[3] https://accountable.us/watchdog-major-landlord-companies-con...

[4] https://sfist.com/2024/03/29/report-sf-rents-still-coming-do...

Natural competition is supposed to keep that in check: Supply and demand dictates that in a free market (which UBI does not implicitly change), a landlord with a vacancy will try to offer a better deal than their peers who also have vacancies, with the direct incentive of getting units filled.

The idea is that some money (a rented unit provides more income than a vacant unit does) is better than no money, which incentivizes landlords to get units filled and making money instead of not making money -- in large part by competing on price. That's how supply and demand works.

In a free market, landlords can't really say in unison "Hey, I heard everyone has an extra $1k every month! So guess what: Your rent just went up by $1k! Suckers!"

I mean sure, some might say that -- or at least try to do that.

But the way it is supposed to work is that one of their peers goes "Yeah? Well, rent with me! I only raised rent by $700!" and another goes "Hey, I've got lots of vacancies! My rent only went up by $400!" and this rinses and repeats until the ultimate lowball of "Rents are up? Not here! Save $50 compared to last year!"

That's not to say that the concept is without flaws: Collusion can happen[0], and collusion fucks up pricing in an otherwise-free market.

But this kind of collusion is already criminalized, and criminals will both exist and collude with or without UBI.

[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/12/justice-department-...

(In an ideal reality free of criminal acts, rents must increase a bit if for no other reason than a properly-profitable landlord's expenses must also increase a bit: UBI isn't free to fund, and the haves must fund it more than the have-nots do. That's unavoidable. But it also can't be an increase of precisely $1k/month or whatever a UBI might hypothetically be: That's hyperbolic nonsense even with criminal landlords colluding to victimize tenants.

Fortunately for the concept of UBI in this context, landlords are kind of small potatoes here in a sea of others who also need to extract their pound of flesh to pay for it. This kind of broad-scale wealth redistribution can be good, I think, but it does not happen for free.)

But on the plus side, this should theoretically bring tuition costs down as there won't be effectively unlimited capital for tuition. It also encourages potential students to consider more carefully whether getting a degree makes sense.

Perhaps Pell Grants should also be expanded in eligibility (to make it so that more poor, but motivated kids can get access to higher education).

The goal of these changes would be to: - Reduce the market distortions that are created by giving out federally backed student loans (reducing or at the minimum slowing the pace of growth of tuition costs) - Reduce the burden on taxpayers by eliminating public student loans - Makes it so that kids don't get stuck with student loans that are a drag on them for life, at worst, they'll have to deal with bankruptcy

Potential downsides: - Reduces number of people studying potentially useful/valuable to society degrees that don't have much expected monetary return - Potentially reduces average level of education in the population (could be untrue if it also sufficiently reduces tuition costs)

What you are describing is referred to as the "velocity of money" - how many times the same dollar changes hands, which there is a rough approximation baked into the monetary supply analysis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

The other way to implement it is to stage a coup, gain power by sheer force, and implement it that way.

In either case, you don't need an academic study.

> Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database.

Except money does grow on trees (and in supernovae and a few other places). Money is not a number in a database is a unit of net work owed by someone else to you. No work can be accomplished without sunlight and trees.

Money has to come from somewhere, because there's only so much work being done.

Highly recommend Debt: the first 5000 years by Graeber if you're confused.

UBI is typically not envisioned as means-tested (hence ”universal”).

The issue here is the layabout is likely that way not from his own doings. There are many people you think are normal and fine, but are some degree of mindfucked and just want to find peace, quiet, guaranty, safety, basically the tranquility of mother's bosom because they got kicked too hard too many times.

Those are (IMO) who are your likely layabouts, who need to salve bleeding minds. Depression is high, suicides and deaths of despair are high. There is always an exit from the matrix and people commonly call it selfish to take it. I do not agree with this sentiment. I am not on that journey myself but have known others who were; though, I am introspective enough to understand that often times we can play key roles in other peoples' lives and we really need to try and be there for support and understanding as much as possible. Quit assuming bad faith, or the worst intentions in people even if it's Nash. We have to try to maintain the mindframe that others are acting in good faith, or at least as good enough faith as [they think] they can while trying to survive.

Working a job that makes the world a worse place because you need to survive is the issue.

It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up arms in a factory that produces produces that people want, but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good thing.

This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens, and their time spent not working is instead spent on improving their communities. I think that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making a billionaire slightly richer

Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do open source projects instead.

The second order effect of putting everyone in the workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no community support for people on the edge of homelessness, or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.

Yep. As long as the wealthy can't leave, or keep their wealth / investments elsewhere, it should work pretty well.

I think part of the problem is that people are assuming that you can and should pick a number for UBI that is sufficient for basic needs everywhere.

$1k/mo is probably not enough in San Francisco. But should our UBI be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs anywhere they'd like to live, or should it be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs if they're willing to leave the high cost of living areas and go out into the rest of the country where rent and food and transportation is cheaper?

I think $1k does count as sufficient for basic needs, personally.

It is literally impossible to imagine a system where everyone benefits, unless you have a free energy machine of course.

I want to live in a society where people have time to actually live.

This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years.

I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.

I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.

The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.

Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing.

Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.

For instance, couples where both partners need a job in a fixed location have less mobility than couples where one or both can work remotely. Therefore, they are locked into their geographic markets, unable to explore better opportunities.

The goals and incentives (for companies) aren't currently aligned with our needs & problems (as a society). So a lot of resources get spent on things like advertising, that (in theory) could instead be spent on solving problems related to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, if the incentives existed or the goals were set differently.

Even reading it more charitably, students and recent graduates still probably would like access to credit cards, or the housing rental market, or whatever. Bankruptcies stick with you for 7(?) years, so you'd also have to think about whether you'd be locked out of the mortgage market, auto loan market, what-have-you, while your peers are able to make those moves.

Bankruptcies are also like a whole legal thing with a judge and everything, so I doubt we'd see every single student getting their whole debt discharged instead of a judge just being like "Didn't you, like, just spend all this money on getting the training required to get a high-paying job? Seems like if you plan on working anytime soon you should make some payments."

Also lenders can just like, be more selective or restrictive in other ways? Higher interest rates, requiring more established co-signers, etc etc etc. Honestly the strangest part of this is that we've normalized saddling 18 year-olds with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

Maybe put the school on the hook in some way too, forcing it to actually screen for talent (which would absolutely murder DEI lol), that way investor isn't totally SOL if the school was the useless party.

Wow, I just made education affordable again by murdering any safety in financially speculating in it. Change the game, change the outcomes!

I cannot even name one thing that is not broken beyond belief. The conservative government has added the debt ceiling to our Constitution requiring a 2/3 vote to change it, thereby making investments like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US utterly impossible. However, they are needed for dozens of reasons, not just the collapsing infrastructure which will directly impact our economy.

Conservatives, Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats have all completely failed at running this country for 40+ years. Russian-supported fascists AfD are obviously not an alternative.

We are coasting on the gains, relationships and industries established before 1990. This is where our standing and wealth comes from and we are simply riding on that high until it pops.

I can go deeply into all of the troubles but Ill keep it simple: the state of the military is entirely representative of the state of ALL other sectors. That should be relatable to non-Germans. I am not exaggerating for karma, my deepest worry is the condition of the real estate / housing market. This is material for a complete shit show, it honestly scares me.

Wrong. The only way to go hungry here in Germany is by choice.

The people "skimming off the top" are not the ones paying millions upon millions in taxes. It is those who are to lazy to work, because they and their family get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income. If you are able, but not working in some capacity, you are the leech and millionaires are paying for your leeching.

Why are people in society B concerned with the majority working if they are unnecessary?

People will work very hard to increase their income levels above that required solely for basic needs (i.e. UBI levels), see pretty much every non-minimum wage employee.

No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling

So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?

I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.

So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.

That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.

i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?

(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").

(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.

The graph is true regardless.

Americans could be working 20 hours a week without society falling apart. The only thing that would change would be to the yacht class - who would still be very very wealthy.

> Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets.

How much more does housing cost? I'll save you the effort - it's fully twice as much per square foot, adjusted for inflation.

How much more temporary and flimsy are our clothes?

How much less nutritious is our food? How much more toxic is it - to ourselves, to the soil? How much fatter are we? How much more unhealthy?

We have more gadgets, sure. They're all owned by a handful of companies with damn-near monopoly powers, and none of them are changing this trend of a more and more unequal society.

So... What's your point?

I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.

And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.

Because we not only figured that out, but already implemented this several times in practice. Productivity decreasing until there is nothing to eat, and then people dies from starvation (for some reasons they can't live without food)

Who willingly endeavors to write text editors in 2024 when acme(4) exists?

I jest. More seriously though, if the measure of one's value to society is in their ability to crank out CRUD apps, I'm appalled. I want more dishwashers, more plumbers, more framers, more joiners, more cooks, more babysitters, more stonemasons, and the only way any of that kind of hard labor is sustainable is if there's a cushion to fall back on to recuperate. Bodies break. They break more catastrophically when the damage is continued and sustained over time.

I want my girlfriend to feel free to take on domestic work full-time with the knowledge that, no matter what, she'll be paid for it and that her domestic labor contributions, as informal as they are, are valued monetarily without my having to make up the balance. Likewise, I want that there in case I myself want to take up those domestic responsibilities for a while.

These are two cohorts that literally cement the foundation of society, let alone our trade system, not a cavalcade of keyboard cowboys wrangling Ruby on Rails. I want UBI for them because, without them, the entire project literally crumbles.

Because they're infantile, used to picnicking and playing their guitars, and devoid of industrial skills like lathe operating or CRUD app development?

> You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.

Isn't this even more egregious in the case of bank bailouts? Shouldn't that money have evaporated?

These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages.

Have you never met any of these "leeches" taking benefits?

People living out of it are living in absolute misery, well under the poverty line.

To others: This thread is full of propaganda from the neoliberal and extreme right like this. Don't believe a single bit, they do not describe the state of the country nor how the policies work. It is a common wave of propaganda though and maybe interesting from that side.

$3k with tons of free time all week.

Or add working for $3k extra money by giving up all your free time? Not worth it.

Unless of course apartments become $5k a month since that's about the money that a person on UBI plus a bad job has..

That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games.

I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.)

I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things.

(I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things.

But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)

(I've stayed in cheap-ish hotel rooms that are a lot larger and more flexible than that. I've also stayed in far worse.)

And that's... well, fuck: Isn't that OK? Is it not OK for some people who have (for whatever reason) failed to thrive and climb ahead at the present time to have these things?

(I think it's OK to give all people means with which to limit how far they can fall, even if that means that many quasi-successful people are essentially including this as a line-item that they pay to themselves on their own tax bill.

I also think that it is imperfect, and that we mustn't let imperfection stand in the way of general progress.

I mean: Nothing is fucking perfect. But the mere existence of ubiquitous imperfection doesn't somehow mean that positive progress cannot ever be made.)

They are better off than 95-99%% of the world's population. Put this into perspective. I've seen incredible poverty in this world. Our people are largely ungrateful and have lost the point entirely.

> You said you lived this way for the first 18 years of your life, then ask your parents how much sacrifices they made so you can feel this comfortable

You don't know my situation. There were little sacrifices to be had. I also never said it was always comfortable. But it was dignified and we had everything we needed. There was not a single day where we had to skip meals, and I remember filling out the forms for school trips myself. To live always comfortable is not the point of welfare.

> I've personally given benefits to these people, and I can assure you that you live in a fiction built for you by propaganda on TV.

Seeing as you're swatting away my opinions and personal experience as propaganda, I don't think there is any way to get a fruitful discussion out of this. I don't think we should lower welfare benefits. I just think we're being nationally out of touch with reality.

I want to see you attempt to do the math to show that.

Here's my rough math: Mean income is about $60k. If we take the extra simple option, we can increase all tax brackets by 20% and give everyone a $12k credit, and it trivially balances. The median income increases, the low end of income drastically increases, and higher incomes drop.

Such an outcome is very far from total socialization. The effective tax rate of anyone below $60k income drops, and the max marginal rate is a not-crazy 57%.

But also we can make the tax increase progressive as well. And we can include capital gains as income and lower the percents. And we can cut a good chunk of existing welfare which decreases the tax burden. This isn't a suggestion for an optimal method, it's a basic sanity check.

[0] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/scholz-so...

I still don't agree it's right wing propaganda. Bürgergeld is just one part of a larger picture of why people don't want to work anymore. The reality is that social welfare in its entirety is too close to what you can earn with low skilled work, wages are too low and benefits are too high and cut off too suddenly.

> It's not the amount, as in 99% of scenarios being on state welfare completely sucks in Germany

Again, I can not confirm. I have lived on state welfare (Hartz IV) for my entire life before moving out of my parents.

> it's the scenario of not having enough money for food at the end of the month, being scared to heat in the winter and each unforeseen bill a mayor crisis.

This is not true in my experience. I don't know where you're getting this information from. Heating costs were always covered unless you heat like a maniac and unforseen bills are not happening. Where should they? Your apartment and car fixing costs are covered. You can read more about this here: [1]

> Also, it is also not okay to not mention that bürgergeld is still combined with sanctions. If not taking up (usual shitty ) work it can be lost, or missing a summoning, etc. Being in that system is thus highly stressful. Those sanctions were supposed to go away, instead they were made harder. Thanks SPD.

Why shouldn't they take up shitty work? It's not undignified. My mother stocked shelves for Aldi. She worked gas stations. She did community work. She couldn't hold a job for long. It's hard work and that's okay. You don't have the right to dodge shitty work just because you don't think it's gratifying. It's also not as stressful as you make it out to be. You have to remember, you're still getting so much stuff for free there are millions of people who would die for that chance. A little stress still makes it worth it.

Yes, you need to be smart with money. That's okay. Welfare should not make for a live of comfortable spending. But people don't live in a state of desolation. The point of welfare is to enable people who can't work to live a dignified live. Not a comfortable one. We're just so out of touch in Germany, people on our welfare system can't see their incredible privilege.

[1]: https://www.inside-digital.de/news/buergergeld-jobcenter-bez....

You ignore which limits and obligations are placed under the bürgergeld system, and how stiffling the bureaucracy is. For example, yes, Schuldbedarf is covered, but only up to an amount. Depending on the school that can be not enough, and then be a big problem. You also implied (and even said directly) that aids like Wohngeld and Bürgergeld can be combined, which is wrong.

> They do provide a car as well if you need it for work or for educational purposes

I just linked you to an article showing that they did not.

>> That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.

> I've not said this once.

It is impossible to read your comments without seeing that this is what you want to say. You also directly agreed with comments saying the same. I quoted you already on that.

Look at life expectancy and infant death, it's night and day. People really tend to underestimate how world changing antibiotics and vaccines really are. And most of those “dirt poor Indians” have mobile phones too!

> How are these people struggling exactly?

You really need to build up empathy and open your eyes to the world, look at them, listen to their stories and you'll hear the struggle. Here are a few examples from the top of my mind: the constant fear of being sanctioned because they did something deemed “wrong” by the administration, is one easy example. The contradictory requirements they need to meet. The struggle to get those benefits in the first place (try interacting with the administration when you're not fully literate, or barely speak German). The lack of any financial mattress in case of trouble, which makes even minor issues critical (an example which happened recently to someone I know: you need to comply with rules in order to get your benefits, but one day your old car break and you cannot afford to repair it, but you also cannot comply anymore without it and risk losing money). It's about having no food left in the fridge 3 days before you get your benefits and cannot buy new before it comes in. Everyone has their story, and they are depressing. But to accept that those struggles are real, you need to make the effort of looking at it.

> Prove where I said anything about easy living. Quote me. It‘s you who is lying and I‘m getting annoyed by this conversation.

I've explained that in another comment: I just mix you up with another user whom I was responding to when you replied and took his side, so I mistakenly assumed you where the original guy.

> Maybe consider that differing opinions are not always propaganda you might read in the Bild, but sometimes come from people‘s real experiences.

You are the one asking “how are those people struggling?”, it's easy to assume people don't struggle when it's not directly visible. You are the one arguing that something which exists (poor people being poor and having constant difficulties) doesn't in fact exists. In a way you are telling me that the people I've witnessed, don't exist!

So yeah I blame propaganda because the reasonable reaction to someone telling you “this thing exist” isn't to say “no it doesn't exist”. The line of reasoning “I've never seen that so it must not exist” is not how the human brain works in general. Even flat-eathers don't believe the earth is flat because they've never seen it round, they do believe that because of a socialization process: other people told them it was false, and so they started questioning it and liked the idea.

> all because you assume I‘m some kind of far right idiot. I‘m a bit sad for you honestly.

I never mentioned anything about you being far right. You see, you too are being confused between different HN users;)

A substantial portion of the population doesnt think taxation should be used for distribution at all. They think the fundamental point of taxation is to pay for public goods that everyone uses like roads, police, and firemen.

> Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?

This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working.

I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation among the workers so that some get more, while collectively they get less.

You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?

Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?

UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.

I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.

If you are taking that as your baseline, you have already nationalized every industry and productive asset in the country.

When I think UBI, I think paying for a shared living space and food. A minimum budget, not necessarily a comfortable budget.

You're right I mistook you and nkmnz from whom you defended the original argument.

> and that people on Bürgergeld live in abhorrent poverty, which is demonstrably untrue.

It's only untrue if you define “abhorrent” as worse as everywhere. But that's not a good criteria because then the entirety of the world population today is affluent by even 1800 standards, and most European people in 1800 were themselves in a very good situation compared to Paleolithic humans. So of course people can survive with much less but that doesn't mean these people are suffering. It's as saying to someone with a missing foot that he's OK since others have lost both legs.

People living on social welfare are definitely struggling and only ascetic people would put themselves voluntarily under such a standard of living. And evidently pretty much anyone claiming it's not a harsh life isn't willing to live with so little.

> think people on Bürgergeld starve, are in dire need of heating and live in depressed states for lack of funding.

Skipping meal is routine, and mental health issues are indeed a problem for those people. You are the one lying to yourself.

Yes, that's not a common case, but it happens.

Here an article about 5.5 million Germans not being able to pay for heating:

https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/armut-5-5-million...

>> It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.

> Oh wow, the exact thing people have been saying would happen has happened. Turn's out Quasi-UBI is a drain on tax paying citizens after all. Amazing.

If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.

If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.

Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".

So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.

> I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.

You think the "desired level of UBI" is more than the median income? You're talking to caricatures and fools, not real advocates. And you should have said you were talking about far more than $1000 a month significantly earlier in the conversation.

What if they're not a veteran, but just an unfortunate soul with a disability that provides "zero" value?

Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial support.

Society already produces enough wealth to cover the expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other welfare systems in place today.

Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and choose to do something that I personally believe is of actual value to society rather than please some corporation or VC.

This is a false equivalence. There are odd-jobs now like they were in the past, with much better benefits. There are two classes of people on welfare: Those wo can't work and those who could but don't, for whatever reason. The first class couldn't work hunter or gathering jobs in the past and the second class would be forced to do so out of necessity. The modern world is not a prison for these people, but instead provides a cushion for our nation's weakest. These people wouldn't have had the opportunities you state. They would have just died instead.

> No, you misread me: barely nobody with your or my standard of living would voluntarily adopt this lifestyle.

I agree entirely. 95% of the world's population do not have our standard of living. Which is why they try to migrate into the west. Even European countries with the lowest standards of welfare provide lifestyles and opportunities that seem like luxury to poor people from all over the world.

> You act as if the ability not to work was a luxury that made all this worthwhile, but the truth is almost nobody ever voluntarily leave the wage-slavery state to take advantage of this luxury. Why that in your opinion?

You are correct, they don't and that is not my opinion of European natives. But people leave the state of real slavery and spend their entire life savings with hopes to cross over into the West. Europe will have to protect the standards of welfare like Denmark already does, if we want to keep benefits up to standard for the people who are already here.

> Does that mean that Afghan farmers and people in Favelas are not struggling by your definition?

Of course not, they just struggle differently.

> Please read the massive literature about how many people refuse to go there even when it's close to their home (it's not always, especially in suburban or rural places) because they're “worth more than this”.

That struggle is entirely self-made and quite frankly, not the problem of the Government. Opportunities are readily available. There is no shame in going to a soup kitchen. I had the same sentiment in the past, went there, and dropped any prejudice, because I was hungry.

> You fail to realize how almost all of these (that is, everything except access to public pools) can be basic human needs in modern societies

You would think, but this even the richest country on the earth doesn't provide good schooling to poor children.

> internet is basically mandatory for many government-related stuff

This made me laugh. It's still Germany we're talking about.

> Also, since I can't find it easily on the web, does welfare in Germany genuinely provide access to a car

We do. More often than not, if the Government deems that you don't need a car, you're granted free public transport. I've made use of this system. It was fine.

> because the lack of mobility is a huge blocker for people to get back to the job market

I'd wager the largest blocker for people to get back into the job market is that wages haven't kept up with welfare costs. There is an incredibly sharp drop off point for welfare benefits. For most people able of only unskilled labor, there is a loss of money if they start working at minimum wage level.

We have failed our immigration efforts because of a couple of factors, one of which being the availability of welfare benefits. I know how this sounds, but it's true. Compared to other European nations, for example, only about every fifth Ukranian refuge has found work here. Poland, which does not provide a lot of welfare for refugees, has seen a working rate of 70% in the same group. This problem is twofold however, refugees by and large benefit from unskilled labour and manufacturing, work which is rare to come by in Germany.

I'm not saying we should lower benefits. The only possibility I see is an increase of wages, which by and large isn't really possible in Germany; our infrastructure and global economic competitiveness is declining. The job market is in a dire situation right now and jobs opportunities are getting less available each day. Germany is in a catastrophic state right now and there's no solution. We have a fast aging population, rising inflation, housing, and food costs and too few workers.

To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid.

The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum.

This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.

This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).

Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...

edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...

The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work.

Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.

I saved enough to live comfortably -not richly.

I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated).

I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process.

So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.

A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free.

she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher.

students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.

always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering.

This last part is just my opinion:

Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.

All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror.

Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.

If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point. These are "inferior jobs" in an economic sense and it's up to the employer to do better. Make working for you suck less. Even in customer-facing retail jobs it's more than possible.

I'm having a hard time seeing the downside. Employees can afford to take more risks because they're not betting their livelihood anymore, and it provides a natural upward pressure on wages and working conditions at the bottom on the labor market which is sorely needed. Anyone whose desired lifestyle can't be supported on the meager income, which is most people, there's no change.

I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.

If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.

One concern I have is that publicly announcing ways to break the law might result in the government cracking down on those particular ways. You could make a case for telling people how to break laws which don't really matter either way, and let them figure out how to break laws that are stupid and matter though.

Another, less pressing, concern I have is that if taken to its limit, no laws will matter anymore. I would hope human kindness would keep people from murdering and stealing from each other for the fun of it, but I'd expect some Tragedies of The Commons to occur. This could still be worth it though. I'm in a fortunate enough position to not really understand how limiting the stupid laws are, but I do understand that laws are hard to repeal.

It's not that bad if it's steady; but if it's fluctuating you easily spend a couple hours each month. And for at least some people, that type of work is far worse than their occupation of choice.

The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.

So the plan that passes is the one that claims to help people (appeasing the first group) while also costing the minimum amount of money (appeasing the second group). The proposal with evolutionary fitness in politics is then to create a system that helps people on paper but actually limits eligibility for the system to a minimum number of people or otherwise makes use of it more arduous to deter usage so it costs less. Extra points for making it so complicated that people don't realize what's really happening so they don't object if it doesn't really do what they wanted.

But there is also a level of incompetence/inefficiency here, because the complex and overlapping systems that pass as a result often have high overhead that waste tax dollars, or create bad incentives because nobody thought them through and those incentives create deadweight economic losses adverse to the interests of even the people who want to minimize taxes. As the obvious example, if you create a system with welfare cliffs and then people have the incentive to stay on welfare instead of taking a job, you now have more government expense and lower tax revenue than a system that doesn't do this.

At which point there is a Pareto-optimal improvement on the table if you can get the bill passed.

>I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.

another way to frame this is how much (if any) of your income would you be willing to give up if it meant 0 work hours. Would you take a 10k pay cut? 50k? or are you completely inflexible when it comes to lifestyle spending, or alternatively, do you like your job enough that you would do it for free.

The 10% bracket is all under poverty level (the reasons this exists is somewhere between occasional part time work for seniors or teenagers, the standard deduction)

The 12% bracket includes ~50% of individual filers that are under most welfare levels. Does that 20% increase in tax rate make sense for that group? The Married/household rate covers the majority of American households, including median household income.

The 22% bracket... let's start with this is a 47% graduation increase versus the previous 20% increase (more than double)

The 24% bracket... again, a seemingly random increase of < 10% rate graduation increase

The 32% bracket... an 8 point rate increase, that's 25%...

The 35% bracket, back to a 3 point, 10% increase

the 37% bracket, even more decreasing, a 2 point, 6% increase

So; the rates of graduation increase are 10%, 47%, 10% , 25%, 10%, 6%; from a distance we can see that the 47% and 25% changes are definitely outliers; If, the top rates of change were at least at the top marginal incomes, it would make more sense.

It looks even worse if you also include the regressive 6.2% OASDI payroll tax. 16%, 18%, 28%, 30%, 38%, and 41% -- 25%, 55%, 11%, 26%, 8% (ignoring the employer's OASDI / Social Security)

Nc Income tax rates 4.5%

SC Income Tax Rates $0-$3200, 3% > $3200, 6.5%

Al Income tax rates $0-$500 2% $500-$2500 4% > $2500 5%

My income is at the 24% level above, and I'm paying 52% marginal taxes in Ireland (or 35% of my total income after tax credits etc)

I know about the EITC, but the ETIC net of benefit clawbacks still presents a high marginal rate. Then the EITC itself gets clawed back at its own threshold, imposing a small region of high marginal rates. (The EITC itself is also rather paltry for filers without children.)

Additionally, the US tax system is ill-structured to really implement this. If you're trying to operate on the "under-the-table cash payments for day labour" margin, a system that depends on filing one's taxes to receive a refund later is not exactly hassle-free.

Oh, I always thought it was a reference to the Roman practice of settling veterans on farmsteads [1].

> if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited

I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes. (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342861

The same is true here. If you make $0, you get $12K UBI. If you make $24K, you get $0 UBI. Is that universal?

Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then again that’s something much of the civilized world enjoys without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from home in a pointless conflict.

Indeed though, let’s not lose perspective, let’s take a hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether we’re doing better or worse.

The military is one of the best available options to lift people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at life, and it always has been. but it’s also a chance at no life at all, and so if people are forced into making this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and reflects badly on what we’ve actually accomplished with all the time since antiquity.

I do take your point, though, and don’t protest too much. It’s less a matter of how much is enough for our veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits of political capital before the rest of us, and now that the problems veterans face are similarly butting up against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has become the stalking horse for larger structural issues largely left unaddressed facing us all.

And that's right, its not meant to pay for people who can pay their way themselves, just like in most income redistribution schemes the rich would be taxed at several (thousand?) multiples of the value they receive back.

In the current regime, the rich gain far more benefits from taxes (they pay little, and get to offload much of their cost of society to the rest of us) than in a UBI approach. That's the point.

2. Yes, no matter what, the richest people are going to receive so little benefit relative to their wealth/income that they won't support it. The same is true for most public services, actually. The ultra-wealthy receive little-to-no direct benefit from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, public schools (big one), public universities, or even public police and firefighters (they can afford their own). But somehow they haven't (yet) managed to rid themselves of these horrible violations of their privilege.

A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.

You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.

Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.

The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.

True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.

> Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely.

From a welfare-cliff perspective, that's a fine idea. However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign, suggesting that integrated welfare system might need an even stronger pro-wage bias.

Suppose the employer avoids paying Medicare tax and unemployment insurance, but gives some of this money to the employee, who also avoids paying Medicare tax. This is, of course, illegal, but it isn't inherently the case that the employee is getting the worse of it outside of the risk of being prosecuted for tax evasion.

Unemployment insurance in particular generally screws anyone who maintains stable employment because the net beneficiaries are the people who collect benefits every other year, not the people who pay premiums their whole lives and only collect benefits once if at all. The latter would come out ahead to receive even half the premiums as money they could save and collect interest on and then have in reserve in the event they become unemployed. (In general mandatory insurance of this kind is a net economic loss and a source of benefits fraud that only gets passed by alleging it gets paid for by employers rather than employees, but who pays for something on paper and who is affected by the economic effects of the cost are different things.)

If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.

The system could be as simple as "UBI, also income tax is 50%, end of description".

Yes, the employee must file and pay taxes, even if they've reported their employer to the IRS for mis-classification.

Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.

> In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.

You can always measure by actual consumption.

> By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear

Note Walmart is subsidised by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.

You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.

People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).

It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.

A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.

The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.

If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.

Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.

Every seller has a buyer. Who would be buying these liquidated stocks?

What would the estimated new equilibrium be? What would be the effects of this equilibrium compared to the current state? Can we estimate the pros and cons?

Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.

...why?

We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?

People like to have more stuff, bigger houses, better cars, air conditioning, whatever.

I think people would fight tooth and nail.

I never understood the UBI argument. 30 seconds of napkin math would show you how insane the proposal is, even at the rate of $1000/month. If you want to increase welfare for those below the median income, fine, let's have that discussion. Don't play games with the word 'universal'

The fair way would be if sentences had to pattern match "I think [scheme] is a good idea and we will pay for it by [specific tax proposal].". Seems unlikely in practice though.

Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.

I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.