What is basic income? If you asked 15 people on HN, you're gonna get 15 different answers, because it is a vague belief that throwing money at a system that does not serve the people is going to serve the people.

I've done this math before on HN, so people are probably tired of hearing it, but if you want to give 300 million Americans $10k a year it's going to cost about 3 trillion dollars. The federal budget this year was 4 trillion dollars (and that is a bloated budget).

The suggestion is that in the middle of implementing the largest spending program ever (we shutdown over passing a budget), we are going to manage to get rid of entitlement programs. This is pie in the sky. Why would either major party do this? Their constituencies are tied to those programs. This 10k a year also does not assume healthcare and removes any true fallback for the poorest of the poor. You spend your 10k somehow, you're straight out of luck. If you don't remove those safety nets, then you're neglecting one of the major arguments for basic income.

This is ignoring how much it would suck to live off of 10k a year. It might let someone middle class buy some new stuff, it's not lifting people out of poverty, many of whom, if you look at the numbers, actually receive much more than 10k in value a year off existing programs. It's taking money from them, bloating the budget, for what exactly?

Why increase the budget by 3 trillion dollars (the bigger question is how), when we have a whole range of options, some targeted, some not, that are much cheaper? Would proper healthcare improve many people's lives? Of course it would. How do you propose increasing the budget that much if not by greatly increasing taxes on the wealthy and big business (and remember, they have the power)? If you're gonna goto that trouble, why not do things like busting up some monopolies first and increasing competitiveness in marts? this is a tried and true tactic.

More importantly, do you believe the major parties and the leaders of those parties serve the people or serve themselves? Unless you're very idealistic, the answer seems obvious. If we reformed government to actually serve people better, maybe that would have some good outcomes, and it wouldn't cost 3 trillion a year to find out someone was selling us a dream and not reality. Has any political plan ever gone as well as advertised? Why would it be different this time?

Basic income has very limited testing at scale. That should make you immediately skeptical of claims about it. Nobody really knows what impact it would have. Most software devs for good reason would not advocate for rewriting an entire system in a new language, they'd advocate gradual refactoring (we've all been young though). Basic income is a blind rewrite in a new framework. We've got many smaller things to try, why not those, instead of dying on the hill that is passing basic income through Congress?

I like the idea of basic income, it's just I've yet to see anyone propose a way of doing it that actually makes sense, that is realistic about political realities. One of those realities is the notion of political capital. You only have so much to spend. Basic income is super expensive and it distracts from solvable problems.

To pass basic income you have to reform the system. Figure out how to reform the system first and then worry about basic income. If you reform the system, maybe basic income isn't necessary at all.