Cutting the jobs is very doable, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of public sector employees over the past 5 years.
The concerns I have are:
a) a ratchet effect along the lines of state pensions where the basic income keeps being put up in populist moves but is never reduced
b) that specific entitlements (with their administrative burden) either continue to exist or again get created by politicians in "something must be done" mode. Specifically things like disability benefits, state pensions, child benefits are all likely to still stick around
Finally many of the lessons we've seen in the where welfare reform has been attempted over the past 5 years is that it is the detail which gets you. Young healthy people are not the majority recipients, it is questions over how to support the partially disabled, children of separated parents with joint custody etc. Giving a new entitlement is easy as it is something that wasn't there before. Taking it away is incredibly hard politically.
I don't see how child benefits and state pensions need to exist if you have lifelong BI.
Sure, you could convert state pensions in the public sector into a voluntary retirement fund but the basic idea behind pensions is that the government gives you money in old age so you can afford not to continue to work -- this is entirely solved by BI.
Likewise, child benefits are intended to be spent to accommodate the child, exactly like the child's BI.
Of course good luck convincing prospective pensioners that their pensions are not going to be.
Disclaimer: I have only a vague idea of what the welfare and pension systems are like in the US.
State pensions provide a much higher level of income than a universal basic income could possibly provide.
Basically, government workers agreed to work for a lower current salary for many years, with the coincident agreement that they'd get X% of that (via some complex formula) for life after Y years of service. That X% provides a modest but certainly comfortable lifestyle.
There's no way you can set basic income levels high enough to provide everyone with that same level of lifestyle before they've lifted a finger of productive work. Basic income must be more basic and spartan than that in order to work mathematically/economically/practically.
(My parents both retired as school teachers with 25-ish years of service and a full pension. I'm not privy to the details, but it's enough for them to live reasonably well, but that didn't fall out of the sky; it came from them raising kids and living 25 years on school teachers' modest salaries.)
I concur that child benefits need not exist (unless/except to the extent that children receive basic income of their own).
Its not actually inconceivable. The world is changing. We have to suppose a new sort of industrial infrastructure. One that doesn't need (so many) people to run it. The level of lifestyle (or standard of living) can certainly stay high, even increase, without so many people working. Its already happening!
Rising unemployment is partly due to a rise in automation and industrial efficiency. The ultimate limit is, (almost) nobody needs to work, yet goods are still available and continue to increase.
Even if you could provide that same level of basic income, there's an inherent unfairness between someone who worked in the private sector and saved $1MM for their defined contribution (401K-type) retirement and people who worked for less salary all that time and now rely on their defined benefit (pension) plan. Let's say both are living off $50K per year (4% plus a slight drawdown for the 401K person and $50K in straight pension for the other).
If you use basic income to replace the pension money, but don't confiscate the 401K savings, you've massively disadvantaged the pension holders. If BI is $25K/yr, now one person is living on $75K per year (or $65K/yr and passing along a $1MM inheritance) and the other is living on $50K and will die without a nest egg to pass along.
Trust me, those pensioners are one pretty well-organized voting bloc... ;)
Yupp, pensioners (especially in the US) are a big problem to plans like this.
Ideally (state) pensions would become obsolete and retirement funds would become an entirely personal issue (as they've largely become in Germany btw -- the tax-funded pensions will at best barely keep you above the poverty line even if you've worked every day since from 18 to 65).
So as far as pensions go you will have to go with an unfair transitional period. You could freeze the pensions and pay them out in proportion to the (now discontinued) contirbutions (which at least in Germany is how it works already) on top of the BI. But for pensioners you pretty much end up allowing them to "double dip" or drawing some arbitrary cut-off line for who will receive BI or only grant BI in proportion to the pensions.
But as you may have noticed I'm not well-versed when it comes to US pension systems. I'm assuming it's similar to ours but considering even healthcare was purely defined by the employment contracts until fairly recently I wouldn't be surprised if it's drastically different.
The difference is that a basic income is supposed to persuade non retirement age people to continue to work, hence "basic". A state pension is supposed to be enough to enable every retired citizen to be able to live without working with a sufficient sense of dignity even without any other form of pension. It is almost always higher than the equivalent unemployment benefit.
Now it could be combined (as Finland currently does) with a mandatory pension scheme system in order to provide retired people with an additional income source, but then you're getting beyond a basic income only. See - it's hard!
There might be a more utopian concept of paying everyone enough that they don't need to work at all, but that isn't what is meant by this Finish scheme and what is meant by "basic income" normally.
my dignity is OK only if I can spend at least 6 months travelling around the world, and remaining 6 spoiling myself. good luck satisfying that! (joking on my side, but this whole discussion is pointless, since everybody wants something else from system (and all want as much as they can, and slightly more) and it would produce massive resentment from those that would lose even a single cent
For most of the people, dignity is being able to sleep under a roof, being able to eat at least once a day, being able to be seen by a doctor when they are ill and being able to give an education to their children.
We should be deeply ashamed by the fact that there is people in our rich developed countries who do not have access to that simple things.
Yeah, good luck living a worry-free live on pensions these days.
In Germany outside the public sector pensions put you so far below the poverty line welfare has to jump in and bridge the gap. For anyone entering the workforce today that is.
> I don't see how child benefits and state pensions need to exist if you have lifelong BI.
State pensions need to exist as long as you expect state workers to work for (pension excluded) below-market compensation for the jobs they do. BI has no effect on this one way or the other.
> Sure, you could convert state pensions in the public sector into a voluntary retirement fund but the basic idea behind pensions is that the government gives you money in old age so you can afford not to continue to work
No, the idea behind pensions is that, as part of the exchange for work now, you accept a deal which provides payment later (including specified contribution of the funds from your nominal current income, as well as the rest being contributed by your employer.)
The concerns I have are: a) a ratchet effect along the lines of state pensions where the basic income keeps being put up in populist moves but is never reduced b) that specific entitlements (with their administrative burden) either continue to exist or again get created by politicians in "something must be done" mode. Specifically things like disability benefits, state pensions, child benefits are all likely to still stick around
Finally many of the lessons we've seen in the where welfare reform has been attempted over the past 5 years is that it is the detail which gets you. Young healthy people are not the majority recipients, it is questions over how to support the partially disabled, children of separated parents with joint custody etc. Giving a new entitlement is easy as it is something that wasn't there before. Taking it away is incredibly hard politically.