3 ms·

Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the whole feder

Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the whole federal budget. Let's see if I'm remembering that wrong. So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.) So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now. I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.

saghm 10y ago
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's economically feasible or not (as I have neither the expertise or the data to be able to figure out out), but I think part of the idea of basic income is that it would replace other forms of welfare, so the actual increase in the budget wouldn't be the full $2.5 trillion (although it would still be quite sizable).
chongli 10y ago
which is like the whole federal budget Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
mempko 10y ago
Taxes don't fund the federal government. There would be no issue making the money to fund it. Issue is inflation.

saghm 10y ago

I'm not making a judgment about whether it's economically feasible or not (as I have neither the expertise or the data to be able to figure out out), but I think part of the idea of basic income is that it would replace other forms of welfare, so the actual increase in the budget wouldn't be the full $2.5 trillion (although it would still be quite sizable).

chongli 10y ago

which is like the whole federal budget Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets

mempko 10y ago

Taxes don't fund the federal government. There would be no issue making the money to fund it. Issue is inflation.