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I love the idea of a universal basic income. It makes sense from a humanitarian standpoint, an automation taking away jobs standpoint and a minimizing bureaucra

• heydenberk 9y ago
  Zuck himself could furnish about 1% of the annual money: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mark+zuckerberg%27s+net+worth+%2F+(the+population+of+the+US+*+$12000+per+person) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mark+zuckerberg%27s+net...
  • areyousure 9y ago
    Once and not even a full percent ...
• deleted 9y ago
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• jjaredsimpson 9y ago
  How you come up with way short? 326e6*12000/18e12 = .21 Which is inline with the size of https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S With the limited reading I've done on UBI, it seems like a land value tax could be a good candidate system. We should tax things we want to remove like pollution and congestion, not income and investment.
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• carpdiem 9y ago
  Generally, UBI schemes advocate some sort of drop-off in payout as people earn money outside of the program (but structured in such a way as to ensure no sticking points of greater than 100% effective marginal tax). So in net you're not actually giving that $1k/month out to everyone, only the people who don't otherwise make anything. Then someone who makes $1k/month from other sources might pay $500/month in tax, thus reducing their effective, net UBI payment. (note, I made up these numbers completely off the top of my head) Someone who makes much more than that would also pay much more taxes. So in the end, UBI needs to be accompanied with some sort of tax reform, and isn't just about sending out checks to everyone (including Warren Buffet) on top of the existing system.
  • maratd 9y ago
    > Generally, UBI schemes advocate some sort of drop-off in payout as people earn money outside of the program That's the first time I've heard of this. Everything I've seen, everybody gets the same check. Problem with tracking based on income, you're right back to the same welfare system we already have. You'll need a bureaucracy to track income and eligibility, deal with fraud, etc.
    • maxerickson 9y ago
      Yes, everybody gets the same payments. But some combination of 2 other things also happens, the tax regime changes (to fund the checks) or money is printed. There's no avoiding it.
      • maratd 9y ago
        > There's no avoiding it. I haven't seen the math. I imagine it depends highly on the amount you want to pay out, savings due to cutting away current programs, etc., but it's certainly a wonderful opportunity to redo our tax structure, which is unnecessarily complex.
    • notahacker 9y ago
      If you don't have a bureaucracy that tracks income and fraud, you also don't have a tax system to pay for your UBI...
• maratd 9y ago
  Under capitalism, those with capital derive profit through the use of their capital (can be money, factories, machines, etc). A substantial pressure on that profit is labor costs. As labor gets removed from the picture through automation, that capital will be even more profitable. > Could someone please point me to what kind of tax structure a country would need to have to realistically be able to afford UBI? Personally, I would like to see no corporate tax, 10% for individuals, then X% for anything over $1 mil. I don't have a problem that X% being high enough to pay for whatever is needed to keep society stable and I'm quite sure those paying it wouldn't have an issue either. Far better that than the unemployed masses rioting. The problem with universal basic income ... is that you'll only get it into law through bi-partisan action. Its appeal on the right primarily comes from the idea that it would replace all the myriad of programs we currently have. Welfare, section 8, food stamps, medicaid, etc. Getting rid of all that bureaucracy and replacing it with a simple system is appealing. Problem with that is ... all those specialized programs are built so that you are forced to spend that money on specific things. Shelter, food, medicine, etc. If you give someone a check for $1k and they blow it all on a nice TV ... what then?
• lolsal 9y ago
  Sincere question - wouldn't welfare programs still be needed? I don't think 100% of UBI recipients would spend their money wisely and we'd still end up with people in need of basic services or food.
  • novia 9y ago
    Often people set up trusts to care for the individuals who are unable to responsibly care for themselves. I'd imagine their UBI check would be deposited into one of those trusts instead of directly into the account of the incapable individual.
    • mixedCase 9y ago
      Okay, now they've bought food and household items with their money, sold it in the black market and bought a slightly-less-nice TV. Which is what happens currently with these systems.
• legitster 9y ago
  It only works when it comes in lieu of traditional entitlements (medicaid, social security, food stamps, etc). Which is also why it is so politically infeasible.
• alexilliamson 9y ago
  Keeping the calculation back of the envelope, if the population is 320 million and you want $12k a year for everyone, that's 3.9 trillion dollars. If US GDP is 18 trillion, you would need tax an additional 20% of everything to fund UBI. The US taxes a lower share of its GDP than many countries (https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/u-s-tax-rates-the-big-picture/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/u-s-tax-rates-the-big-pi...), but taxing 20% more would make it far and away the most taxed country in the world.
  • maratd 9y ago
    Why are you using total population? I would only cut a check to adults. If you include kids, that's a hell of an incentive to have huge families. Adult population is 240 million. That's $2.8 trillion. Quite a bit less than your number.
    • gremlinsinc 9y ago
      Everyone shares the home, so I'd think I'd do it by household...but cut 2 checks, average home rental cost nationwide + average cost of food at grocer. Then for each dependent add cost of food..maybe $100-200 extra. So say it's 1200 for rent, and 300 for food, and 3 kids at $100 extra they'd get like 1800 for everyone in household..
      • maratd 9y ago
        > Everyone shares the home, so I'd think I'd do it by household Sure, except that would discourage co-habitation/marriage. You get more checks by living apart. Balancing incentives is actually quite hard.
        • cam_l 9y ago
          I like this comment. I always do a mental check on solutions to see not how they succeed but how they fail.
    • godelski 9y ago
• nebabyte 9y ago
  UBI is such a fundamental shift to the model that the back-of-the-napkin calculations would look even more basic and stripped away than that. The questions become much more 'fundamental' in nature. "What is our net import and export? Do the resources we have and import support the mouths we currently have?" "Is there enough developed land to house the homeless who'd otherwise not benefit from that $1000 or whatever you allocate them?" One of the beautiful things about UBI is that it has the potential to strip away the artificial excesses created in the pockets of the world today that have more money than literally they know what to do with. The sectors in which money simply indicates abstractions like "the degree to which person X has control over companies A/B/C" or "what their risk is if Y thing does or does not happen". The derivatives market, wall street - highly-dressed-up casinos and skill games, essentially, as far as their value to society goes. > Could someone please point me to what kind of tax structure a country would need to have to realistically be able to afford UBI? I'm right there with you hoping for this kind of analysis to become more common discourse, but to me the answers that even begin to get at the heart of the problem have much less to do with the money than the fundamentals you're trying to have that money "create".
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• a-priori 9y ago
  People would have said the same thing about universal health care before it was done. Providing health care to everyone has a massive price tag, especially by the standards of the day when it was introduced (mid 20th century -- NHS was founded in Britain in 1948). Income tax was relatively new as a major source of government revenue, so if you asked someone before it was introduced how to fund a public health care system, they would have said it's impossible because it's so fantastically expensive. You would have spent all of the government's revenues on the program, and then some. Just like people say now about basic income. The thing is, the money is going to be spent anyway. Everyone needs health care when they're sick, just like they need to spend money to eat and live. So the net effect on the economy should be negligible. Any difference is because people are currently too cash-poor to spend the money they need to, and that's precisely the social issue you're trying to solve. But the main difference difference is that to provide it universally you need to make the government a middleman to handle redistributing the money. That means expanding the tax base to cover the difference, so the money is routed through the government rather than being spent directly. For universal health care, income tax provided this extra tax revenue. We'll need to either expand income tax or find a new source of tax revenue to fund universal basic income. I view universal basic income as the 21st century version of universal health care: the next evolution in the role of governments in society.
• grandalf 9y ago
  I think you might underestimate the cost of services that address the extended consequences of basic poverty. There is lots of criminal enforcement, healthcare, housing, etc., that is disproportionally expensive to maintain due to the perverse incentives created by existing policies. With basic income, the only people who would need additional services would be those with physical or mental illnesses which prevent them from being able to escape from squalor. Whereas today there are many people whose skill-set consists of many clever ways of exploiting the social programs that are intended to provide much-needed assistance. Also, with basic income, there would still be taxation of that income so many blighted areas would begin to have a tax base for things like law enforcement and other important infrastructure. When you consider that nearly half of Americans effectively pay zero income tax today (1), their productive output is very low and most of it goes directly into state taxes and payroll taxes (which are highly regressive). So the accounting of basic income would necessitate removing the regressive shackles of payroll tax AND replacing the demographically unsustainable social security system with something funded out of general revenue. The thing I like best about basic income is that it corrects for the political distortions caused by social security. The annual statements are expressed in highly misleading future dollars and the whole thing is a self-perpetuating shell game that nobody can count on. But imagine instead a large number of voters of all ages who happen to have had to lean on basic income for some period of time in their lives. We'd end up with a system driven (politically) by empathy and experience, at least compared to the status quo when it comes to social welfare programs. Imagine if everyone who ever took out unemployment insurance, had to consider filing for bankruptcy, ruined his/her credit score due to unexpected job loss, etc., could relate to the usefulness of having that basic income to fall back on. There would be a huge impact on things like payday lending and all the gray market (or even black market) lending that victimizes the poorest among us. Suddenly a whole swath of minor organized crime vanishes. Similarly, kids whose parents are unable to create a stable financial environment would have some degree of additional stability. Not to mention the reduced stress placed on the lowest earners. Studies show that low status work is among the most stressful things humans experience, and I would not be surprised if a lot of substance abuse and domestic abuse were reduced by the type of broad cushion that basic income provides. Even Milton Friedman advocated for Basic Income, calling it "negative taxation" so that there would be a consistent incentive to work which lacked the distortions caused by typical approaches to welfare. 1: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax-2016-02-24 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-fede...
• dsparkman 9y ago
  UBI would need to implemented as a Negative Income Tax where all welfare programs are effectively replaced by the NIT. I think the one caveat would be that for UBI to work under this model, that there is universal healthcare in the mix. The cost of healthcare is used as a benchmark against which the NIT threshold is set.