12 ms·

A UBI in the salary range of an Amazon warehouse worker would be on the order of 1/3rd GDP.

by gridlockd 7y ago

mrybczyn 7y ago
30K / year * 100 million people = 3 trillion. 1/6th GDP. Lots of money.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  (Presuming the USA) We have 327M people, approximately 250M of which are adults. So, you're off by half, and the OP's statement of 1/3 seems closer…
- psandersen 7y ago
  It is a huge amount of money. Though the real question is the feedback loops UBI creates IMHO... The money will be injected straight back in the economy as people are still living paycheck to paycheck at that wage, so given studies show every $1 given to people on lower income results in around $1.2 in GDP* you'd expect overall GDP to grow provided its the UBI level and tax system is properly balanced. Clever use of UBI also allows redoing many labour laws & protections because having UBI to fall back on will substantially improve the bargaining power of workers so they won't need the same protections. * Sorry don't have a reference, seen this discussed a few places as common knowledge.
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
That's much higher than I expect, citation? I was told there would be math.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Did you make any attempt to solve it yourself? Googling: Amazon warehouse worker $14/hour. 2080 hours per year = $29K. US Adult population 252 million. Multiply: 7.4 Trillion. US GDP (2017) 19.4 Trillion. Taking only US citizen adults, the figure is still >90% of the above.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Yeah, I could do it myself, I was being sarcastic but maybe no one could tell. One question is always what is the UBI amount. Say 1k for kids, 2k for adults. Wikipedia says 18% are 14 y.o. or under, so say 25% will get 1k, 75% get 2k each month. Use 325 mil as population. 325m * (1/4 * 12k + 3/4 * 24k) = 6.8 trillion so basically the same as you. I want people to say what their vision of the size of UBI funding is. It's ambiguous, kind of like what is brexit? The other side of it is we are a consumer spending driven economy. If consumers, especially poor people, had more money they'd spend it (unlike say overpaid software engineers like me). We'd get a big boost in the economy. Just like reducing unpayable college loans will free up much more money for the economy. Instead of thinking about the % of the gdp, think about tax revenue. It's 3.6 trillion a year. Tripling tax overhead to fund this new thing would actually hurt the economy, even I can see that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
wjmao88 7y ago
Having one third of the value created by everyone pooled together to distribute to everyone sounds completely fine to me. I'd say the society as a whole plays a role that is on average greater than 1/3 on your success.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Would that be on top of the over 1/3rd that I already pay to the US Treasury?
  - wjmao88 7y ago
    It would overlap with a lot of what you are already paying. It completely overlaps with social security and partially overlaps with the taxes that goes to social welfare. For the rest of your tax money, there are concrete places that those are going to and if you don't like them, we can altogether as a society do something about it. And guess what, with UBI people will have a lot more time and freedom to spend on actually participating in politics. Sure, in the end it might bumps it up from 1/3 to 1/2 maybe, but you are getting a lot of that back anyway as UBI to yourself. Even at 1/2 I don't think its unfair.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  First of all, GDP is a bad measure for "value created". It's more of a measure for "money spent" and that generally includes a lot of long-term and debt, especially in the US. Secondly, you can't actually redistribute GDP. You could (in theory) take 100% of the profits of all businesses, that would add up to about 12% of GDP: https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/8/30/saupload_Blog_2018_08_29.jpg https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/8/30/saupload_B... Notice the drop around 2008? That's what happens when a lot of debt can't be serviced anymore. Lastly, "society as a whole" doesn't contribute to anyone's success. Just because you are a member of society doesn't automatically imply you have done anything for anyone. If I was offered a UBI on an Amazon's worker's salary, I would just retire, or at least drastically reduce my workload. A lot of my money goes towards my retirement anyway, so why bother? This is entirely different from a "subsistence UBI", which I do support in principle.
driverdan 7y ago
UBI supporters always seem to forget that the money has to come from somewhere.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I'm a UBI supporter in theory. It's the practical math that always leaves me hung up. Even $600/mo/adult citizen is a seemingly prohibitive amount of money (works out to approximately the entire amount of all individual income tax payments, or about half of total receipts, including FICA). And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
  - sim_card_map 7y ago
    Current social security spending gives us $9k per household. Cutting military spending in half (utopian, but so is UBI): $3200 per hh. Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh. Single payer would give us about $1k per hh plus free healthcare for everyone. No more insurance payments. That is already about $21k per year per household.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      > Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh. If income tax was raised to 50% flat and you keep all the social security and single payer spending, your paycheck would net maybe 25% of your salary. Who works full time for 25 cents on the dollar when they can just retire? So then people won't work full time, your tax revenue, your single payer money, your pension money, it all goes down. It can't pay for your UBI. Even worse, all this spending you are talking about redistributing isn't even paid for today. It's funded by debt. With the boomers retiring, there are huge amounts of unfunded liabilities. It may not be obvious to you, but what you are proposing is that we can just all sit back, work less, print money and everyone will be better off. It's a fantasy. To be clear, I support a UBI, but one has to be very careful about the actual amount.
      - 7y ago
robotresearcher 7y ago
For context, Medicare and Social security are each about $1 trillion/yr for a total of about 10% of GDP today.

A UBI in the salary range of an Amazon warehouse worker would be on the order of 1/3rd GDP.

mrybczyn 7y ago

30K / year * 100 million people = 3 trillion. 1/6th GDP. Lots of money.

deathanatos 7y ago
(Presuming the USA) We have 327M people, approximately 250M of which are adults. So, you're off by half, and the OP's statement of 1/3 seems closer…
psandersen 7y ago
It is a huge amount of money. Though the real question is the feedback loops UBI creates IMHO... The money will be injected straight back in the economy as people are still living paycheck to paycheck at that wage, so given studies show every $1 given to people on lower income results in around $1.2 in GDP* you'd expect overall GDP to grow provided its the UBI level and tax system is properly balanced. Clever use of UBI also allows redoing many labour laws & protections because having UBI to fall back on will substantially improve the bargaining power of workers so they won't need the same protections. * Sorry don't have a reference, seen this discussed a few places as common knowledge.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

That's much higher than I expect, citation? I was told there would be math.

sokoloff 7y ago
Did you make any attempt to solve it yourself? Googling: Amazon warehouse worker $14/hour. 2080 hours per year = $29K. US Adult population 252 million. Multiply: 7.4 Trillion. US GDP (2017) 19.4 Trillion. Taking only US citizen adults, the figure is still >90% of the above.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Yeah, I could do it myself, I was being sarcastic but maybe no one could tell. One question is always what is the UBI amount. Say 1k for kids, 2k for adults. Wikipedia says 18% are 14 y.o. or under, so say 25% will get 1k, 75% get 2k each month. Use 325 mil as population. 325m * (1/4 * 12k + 3/4 * 24k) = 6.8 trillion so basically the same as you. I want people to say what their vision of the size of UBI funding is. It's ambiguous, kind of like what is brexit? The other side of it is we are a consumer spending driven economy. If consumers, especially poor people, had more money they'd spend it (unlike say overpaid software engineers like me). We'd get a big boost in the economy. Just like reducing unpayable college loans will free up much more money for the economy. Instead of thinking about the % of the gdp, think about tax revenue. It's 3.6 trillion a year. Tripling tax overhead to fund this new thing would actually hurt the economy, even I can see that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

wjmao88 7y ago

Having one third of the value created by everyone pooled together to distribute to everyone sounds completely fine to me. I'd say the society as a whole plays a role that is on average greater than 1/3 on your success.

sokoloff 7y ago
Would that be on top of the over 1/3rd that I already pay to the US Treasury?
- wjmao88 7y ago
  It would overlap with a lot of what you are already paying. It completely overlaps with social security and partially overlaps with the taxes that goes to social welfare. For the rest of your tax money, there are concrete places that those are going to and if you don't like them, we can altogether as a society do something about it. And guess what, with UBI people will have a lot more time and freedom to spend on actually participating in politics. Sure, in the end it might bumps it up from 1/3 to 1/2 maybe, but you are getting a lot of that back anyway as UBI to yourself. Even at 1/2 I don't think its unfair.
gridlockd 7y ago
First of all, GDP is a bad measure for "value created". It's more of a measure for "money spent" and that generally includes a lot of long-term and debt, especially in the US. Secondly, you can't actually redistribute GDP. You could (in theory) take 100% of the profits of all businesses, that would add up to about 12% of GDP: https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/8/30/saupload_Blog_2018_08_29.jpg https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/8/30/saupload_B... Notice the drop around 2008? That's what happens when a lot of debt can't be serviced anymore. Lastly, "society as a whole" doesn't contribute to anyone's success. Just because you are a member of society doesn't automatically imply you have done anything for anyone. If I was offered a UBI on an Amazon's worker's salary, I would just retire, or at least drastically reduce my workload. A lot of my money goes towards my retirement anyway, so why bother? This is entirely different from a "subsistence UBI", which I do support in principle.

driverdan 7y ago

UBI supporters always seem to forget that the money has to come from somewhere.

sokoloff 7y ago
I'm a UBI supporter in theory. It's the practical math that always leaves me hung up. Even $600/mo/adult citizen is a seemingly prohibitive amount of money (works out to approximately the entire amount of all individual income tax payments, or about half of total receipts, including FICA). And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
- sim_card_map 7y ago
  Current social security spending gives us $9k per household. Cutting military spending in half (utopian, but so is UBI): $3200 per hh. Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh. Single payer would give us about $1k per hh plus free healthcare for everyone. No more insurance payments. That is already about $21k per year per household.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > Raising income tax to a simple flat 50% rate gives us extra 0.7 trillion or $7k per hh. If income tax was raised to 50% flat and you keep all the social security and single payer spending, your paycheck would net maybe 25% of your salary. Who works full time for 25 cents on the dollar when they can just retire? So then people won't work full time, your tax revenue, your single payer money, your pension money, it all goes down. It can't pay for your UBI. Even worse, all this spending you are talking about redistributing isn't even paid for today. It's funded by debt. With the boomers retiring, there are huge amounts of unfunded liabilities. It may not be obvious to you, but what you are proposing is that we can just all sit back, work less, print money and everyone will be better off. It's a fantasy. To be clear, I support a UBI, but one has to be very careful about the actual amount.
    - 7y ago

robotresearcher 7y ago

For context, Medicare and Social security are each about $1 trillion/yr for a total of about 10% of GDP today.