4 ms·

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.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      > one has to be very careful about the actual amount. And limits/process on how/if it can be raised. Otherwise, it's likely to devolve into people literally voting themselves an ever-increasing share of money from the treasury...
- xienze 7y ago
  > And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence. Well the good news is that once UBI is implemented all future elections will boil down to politicians promising a bigger UBI increase than the other guy. Problem solved!
- bluGill 7y ago
  I'm not sure if I support UBI or not. There are good arguments on both sides. I suspect that there are unintended consequences of it that are currently completely unknown (I don't know if they are good or bad). If I'm to support UBI it would be a meager existence: enough that you can eat. Like socialism UBI need to account for eventually somebody needs to do something. Food needs to come from someplace, that means somebody had to work for it, and that somebody should get some reward for it.
- sim_card_map 7y ago
  If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions, etc, and add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%), every single household can have a UBI of about 42 000 euros/year. The numbers are similar for other western economies.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    >add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%) Good luck passing a bill that raises my effective tax rate from 17% to 55%. Obviously if you take a whole lot more money from everyone else there will be more to hand out to others.
    - sim_card_map 7y ago
      There's no way your effective rate goes from 17% to 55%. Did you include the extra 3000/month you'll be getting?
      - EpicEng 7y ago
        Ok that's fair; I completely ignored the ~$36,000 deduction I'd be getting.
      - gridlockd 7y ago
        The effective total rate of taxes may not be 55%, but the rate on income earned would be. Who would work full-time in an ordinary job if it was taxed at 55% when they simultaneously get paid a generous UBI? Also remember you counted in pensions into your budget, those are separate from taxes. So the net profit from working would be maybe 30% or less - ridiculous!
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions... Okay... > ... add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%) No. You can't presume anything about increased revenue from extra taxes. If you taxed income for any amount of work at 50% and you give every "household" 42,000€ (which I assume is livable in NL) you would drastically reduce the incentive to work and pay taxes, so your actual tax revenue goes down. > The numbers are similar for other western economies. The numbers generally say that if you pool all the social spending, you can redistribute it to everyone and it will pay for a subsistence level of living. However, a big part of that pool is pensions, which are liabilities in proportion to the amount paid by the individual. A lot of pensioners would be subsidizing people who never paid into the system. That's the main problem.
ryandrake 7y ago
Oh woe! Where in the world will we find all this money? There is such a shortage of money in the country! San Francisco was recently reported to have 1 billionaire for every 11,600 residents [1]. Maybe we should start looking there. 1: https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/billionaires-San-Francisco-world-report-wealth-x-13832316.php https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/billionaires-San-Franci...
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Yeah, you should look up how many billionaires there are and how much money they have, not just in the US, but in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire The answer? 2,754 people with a combined $9.2 trillion to their name. In other words, half of US GDP, or one and a half years of UBI as proposed here. That assumes of course all the billionaires in the world can be "convinced" to give up all of their wealth for UBI in the US.
anthonypasq 7y ago
literally no one forgets this. UBI haters somehow never fail to pretend as if no one has put an ounce of thought into how to pay for a proposal that intends on giving everyone free money.
irrational 7y ago
This is the part that confuses me about UBI. Why would anyone work if it became widespread? You could just stay at home and read, work on hobbies, do art, serve other people, play games, etc. instead of going to work. I pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, but if UBI was implemented I'd be paying nothing in taxes (assuming my UBI is not taxed - though, they tax social security, so they probably will tax UBI).

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.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    > one has to be very careful about the actual amount. And limits/process on how/if it can be raised. Otherwise, it's likely to devolve into people literally voting themselves an ever-increasing share of money from the treasury...
xienze 7y ago
> And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence. Well the good news is that once UBI is implemented all future elections will boil down to politicians promising a bigger UBI increase than the other guy. Problem solved!
bluGill 7y ago
I'm not sure if I support UBI or not. There are good arguments on both sides. I suspect that there are unintended consequences of it that are currently completely unknown (I don't know if they are good or bad). If I'm to support UBI it would be a meager existence: enough that you can eat. Like socialism UBI need to account for eventually somebody needs to do something. Food needs to come from someplace, that means somebody had to work for it, and that somebody should get some reward for it.
sim_card_map 7y ago
If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions, etc, and add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%), every single household can have a UBI of about 42 000 euros/year. The numbers are similar for other western economies.
- EpicEng 7y ago
  >add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%) Good luck passing a bill that raises my effective tax rate from 17% to 55%. Obviously if you take a whole lot more money from everyone else there will be more to hand out to others.
  - sim_card_map 7y ago
    There's no way your effective rate goes from 17% to 55%. Did you include the extra 3000/month you'll be getting?
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Ok that's fair; I completely ignored the ~$36,000 deduction I'd be getting.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      The effective total rate of taxes may not be 55%, but the rate on income earned would be. Who would work full-time in an ordinary job if it was taxed at 55% when they simultaneously get paid a generous UBI? Also remember you counted in pensions into your budget, those are separate from taxes. So the net profit from working would be maybe 30% or less - ridiculous!
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > If we take all the money the Netherlands spends on social security, welfare, pensions... Okay... > ... add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%) No. You can't presume anything about increased revenue from extra taxes. If you taxed income for any amount of work at 50% and you give every "household" 42,000€ (which I assume is livable in NL) you would drastically reduce the incentive to work and pay taxes, so your actual tax revenue goes down. > The numbers are similar for other western economies. The numbers generally say that if you pool all the social spending, you can redistribute it to everyone and it will pay for a subsistence level of living. However, a big part of that pool is pensions, which are liabilities in proportion to the amount paid by the individual. A lot of pensioners would be subsidizing people who never paid into the system. That's the main problem.

ryandrake 7y ago

Oh woe! Where in the world will we find all this money? There is such a shortage of money in the country! San Francisco was recently reported to have 1 billionaire for every 11,600 residents [1]. Maybe we should start looking there. 1: https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/billionaires-San-Francisco-world-report-wealth-x-13832316.php https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/billionaires-San-Franci...

gridlockd 7y ago
Yeah, you should look up how many billionaires there are and how much money they have, not just in the US, but in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire The answer? 2,754 people with a combined $9.2 trillion to their name. In other words, half of US GDP, or one and a half years of UBI as proposed here. That assumes of course all the billionaires in the world can be "convinced" to give up all of their wealth for UBI in the US.

anthonypasq 7y ago

literally no one forgets this. UBI haters somehow never fail to pretend as if no one has put an ounce of thought into how to pay for a proposal that intends on giving everyone free money.

irrational 7y ago

This is the part that confuses me about UBI. Why would anyone work if it became widespread? You could just stay at home and read, work on hobbies, do art, serve other people, play games, etc. instead of going to work. I pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, but if UBI was implemented I'd be paying nothing in taxes (assuming my UBI is not taxed - though, they tax social security, so they probably will tax UBI).