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1. "The government is bad at a lot of things but it's great at writing checks to people on time", because there's no income cutoff or other eligibility requirem

1. "The government is bad at a lot of things but it's great at writing checks to people on time", because there's no income cutoff or other eligibility requirements it becomes a lot easier to manage than existing welfare programs. 2. VAT is designed to capture value from companies which employ few people, generate a lot of value, but report little in profits, which are a lot of tech companies today. 4. We spend more on healthcare to worse results than other developed countries, a lot is institutional inefficiency. There's definitely evidence out there to support that people are suffering more even though GDP goes up, look at the labor participation rate of working-age men in these swing states. Epic proposal? Alaska has been running a UBI from the 60s, instituted by a Republican governor and it's wildly popular. A UBI almost passed under Nixon as well, passing the house and getting killed in the senate twice because democrats wanted the amounts to be bigger. The way I see it, we either do this now or we continue to keep our heads in the sand while the country rots from the center.

chrisco255 8y ago
Apple earned $60B in taxable income in 2018. Amazon $2.8B. Amazon has a business model where they continue to reinvest profits in the business. Amazon employs 500,000+ people at minimum wage of $15 an hour. They do plenty for the economy as a whole. And if you tax them with VATs, they'll just increase prices on goods. There is no way around it. If you tax with VATs and extract value out of Amazon, you get less capital investment from companies like Amazon, which are highly efficient at capital allocation. That's the reason our economy grows in the first place. Redistributing capital to consumers only incentivizes and subsidizes consumption. To some extent consumption is good, but too much consumption and not enough production leads to a stale and stagnant economy. Alaska has a budget crisis right now, and they owe back pay to their citizens on the PFD. Besides that obvious disaster, it's a variable payout based on oil money. How sustainable do you think that will be once, say, electric cars become a thing? The variable payout has been as high as $2,000 a person per year...to as low as $800 a year. Alaska has benefited, like many oil-rich nations (including Norway), from a relatively small population with relatively large oil reserves and huge markets to sell those reserves to. Alaska has a population of about 750,000. Smaller than most large U.S. metropolitan areas. If they had the population of Texas (28 million)...that oil dividend would amount to $54 a year (in its highest amount ever). The U.S. is almost three orders of magnitude larger than Alaska in terms of population. A LOT changes at that scale. Especially when the U.S. is THE largest market on the planet. We are the market other industries strive to sell to. Wreck that market, and you'll wreck the world economy. (https://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/dunleavy-embraces-full-pfd-back-pay/article_c88cd77a-157b-11e9-b353-7716eacba0aa.html https://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/dunleavy-embraces...)

chrisco255 8y ago

Apple earned $60B in taxable income in 2018. Amazon $2.8B. Amazon has a business model where they continue to reinvest profits in the business. Amazon employs 500,000+ people at minimum wage of $15 an hour. They do plenty for the economy as a whole. And if you tax them with VATs, they'll just increase prices on goods. There is no way around it. If you tax with VATs and extract value out of Amazon, you get less capital investment from companies like Amazon, which are highly efficient at capital allocation. That's the reason our economy grows in the first place. Redistributing capital to consumers only incentivizes and subsidizes consumption. To some extent consumption is good, but too much consumption and not enough production leads to a stale and stagnant economy. Alaska has a budget crisis right now, and they owe back pay to their citizens on the PFD. Besides that obvious disaster, it's a variable payout based on oil money. How sustainable do you think that will be once, say, electric cars become a thing? The variable payout has been as high as $2,000 a person per year...to as low as $800 a year. Alaska has benefited, like many oil-rich nations (including Norway), from a relatively small population with relatively large oil reserves and huge markets to sell those reserves to. Alaska has a population of about 750,000. Smaller than most large U.S. metropolitan areas. If they had the population of Texas (28 million)...that oil dividend would amount to $54 a year (in its highest amount ever). The U.S. is almost three orders of magnitude larger than Alaska in terms of population. A LOT changes at that scale. Especially when the U.S. is THE largest market on the planet. We are the market other industries strive to sell to. Wreck that market, and you'll wreck the world economy. (https://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/dunleavy-embraces-full-pfd-back-pay/article_c88cd77a-157b-11e9-b353-7716eacba0aa.html https://www.newsminer.com/news/alaska_news/dunleavy-embraces...)