[jhaglund]

I think you should reconsider the assertion that poor in the US usually don't work. Minimum wage jobs leave you just above the poverty level if you're single, below if you are supporting someone. Considering cash based, under the table, transient work that poor people accept is under reported (for fear of loosing benefits which fall off steeply as a recipient's income increases) I think even finding statistics on this would be difficult.

There are sociopaths on welfare (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013... ) as surely as there are sociopaths in power. But what this article is saying is most people who need assistance are going to do good things with the assistance.

[yummyfajitas]

I stand by my claim, about 80% of the US poor choose not to work: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf You may be right that some of the poor are earning additional unreported money, but that also means some of the poor are not really poor.

Insofar as the poor are secretly employed in the grey market, poverty is also secretly not as big a problem as we think. You can't have it both ways.

The article asserts that people will do good things with the basic income, but the one statistic they mention suggests they won't.

[edit: read paragraph 1 to find the stat I cite. I've compared the numbers of poor and non-poor excluding children as well, it doesn't change the comparison much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 ]

[jhaglund]

It is absurd to say that because someone augments their benefits with $300 a month in child care, their problems are over.

Can you point to where in that PDF you got that 80% number? Like, if you're going to cite a link, could you use a number I can ctrl+f? instead of "about 80%"? Because I suspect this number includes children and people who may be better off not working due to medical or other problems.

[jhaglund]

Paragraph 1 states 46.2 million people lived below the official poverty level, and 10.4 million of those were working, so you conclude that the remaining "choose not to work". But the next line states that that first number includes children (at least 14 million http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_912.html) and adults (including those unable to work for legitimate reasons).

Your other link doesn't show its math either. I'm feeling trolled.

[gjm11]

The source you cite does not support the claim you make. Indeed, it pretty much refutes it.

1. It says there were 10.4M "working poor" in the US out of a total of 46.2M "poor", and that the latter number includes children.

2. I haven't found explicit absolute numbers for child poverty in the US, but the figure seems to be somewhere around 15M. That would mean about 30M poor people who aren't children, of whom about 10M are "working poor" and therefore about 20M are not working despite being of working age. No matter how you slice it, 2/3 is not "about 80%".

3. But there's more. You said not "don't work" but "choose not to work". Now, indeed the "working poor" as defined in that report include people who were officially classified as looking for work as well as those who were actually working. But, e.g., poor people who are unable to work because of illness or disability will not be included in that number. Would you say that they "choose not to work"?