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This is a very important reminder. All philosophizing about UBI is superfluous because it is impossible to set the level of this "income". Nobody would be sati

by dilemma 11y ago

This is a very important reminder. All philosophizing about UBI is superfluous because it is impossible to set the level of this "income". Nobody would be satisfied with $2K per person and year; $20K would be too much for any state budget yet too little to live on.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> All philosophizing about UBI is superfluous because it is impossible to set the level of this "income". I disagree that that the difficulty in reaching consensus on the ideal standard of living UBI should provide makes philosophizing about UBI superfluous (in fact, I think that observation is a key part of the philosophizing about UBI, and among the reasons that it should not target a particular living standard; rather, it should be tied to a particular revenue source or set of revenue sources (whether that's a resource extraction charge, a tax on capital income, a land value tax, or some combination thereof), and then simply redistributes the value of that revenue stream among the citizenry on an equal basis. It should be the kind of revenue stream such that the expectation is that with continued technological and economic development, the value (and thus the standard of living it supports) will usually increase over time.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Money is fungible however. The government is still in the position where (theoretically) you're somewhat balancing money in and money out. So tie UBI to some specific revenue source or set of sources, and you still need to: 1.) Determine those sources and 2.) The tax rate on those sources. That's still all money that would have gone to different individuals or different uses. It's also subject to future political pressure to change the percentage. So it's not a case of picking source(s) and rate(s) to support an arbitrary payment outcome. Sometimes it is close to the ideal. The Alaskan Permanent Fund probably comes closest in the US. But that's probably not enough for a UBI and it's unclear what the equivalent at the US level would be. In addition, it's likely that anything directly associated with resource extraction would decrease over time.
ghaff 11y ago
I generally agree. I mean you possibly could do it. One could live on a pretty small sum in a non-luxury area of the country. (Forget about the Bay area. Think Detroit.) But it's going to be a pretty minimalist existence and you're probably not going to find a lot of supplemental jobs in such an area.

by dilemma 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

> All philosophizing about UBI is superfluous because it is impossible to set the level of this "income". I disagree that that the difficulty in reaching consensus on the ideal standard of living UBI should provide makes philosophizing about UBI superfluous (in fact, I think that observation is a key part of the philosophizing about UBI, and among the reasons that it should not target a particular living standard; rather, it should be tied to a particular revenue source or set of revenue sources (whether that's a resource extraction charge, a tax on capital income, a land value tax, or some combination thereof), and then simply redistributes the value of that revenue stream among the citizenry on an equal basis. It should be the kind of revenue stream such that the expectation is that with continued technological and economic development, the value (and thus the standard of living it supports) will usually increase over time.

ghaff 11y ago
Money is fungible however. The government is still in the position where (theoretically) you're somewhat balancing money in and money out. So tie UBI to some specific revenue source or set of sources, and you still need to: 1.) Determine those sources and 2.) The tax rate on those sources. That's still all money that would have gone to different individuals or different uses. It's also subject to future political pressure to change the percentage. So it's not a case of picking source(s) and rate(s) to support an arbitrary payment outcome. Sometimes it is close to the ideal. The Alaskan Permanent Fund probably comes closest in the US. But that's probably not enough for a UBI and it's unclear what the equivalent at the US level would be. In addition, it's likely that anything directly associated with resource extraction would decrease over time.

ghaff 11y ago

I generally agree. I mean you possibly could do it. One could live on a pretty small sum in a non-luxury area of the country. (Forget about the Bay area. Think Detroit.) But it's going to be a pretty minimalist existence and you're probably not going to find a lot of supplemental jobs in such an area.