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> What happens when someone spends all their UBI on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry? What's the difference between that and the current r

> What happens when someone spends all their UBI on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry? What's the difference between that and the current reality? Food stamps can be sold and bought on the black market in exchange for drugs and alcohol; people who want whiskey will be able to get it. Whatever money is spent on enforcing the "sanctity" of food stamps could just go to more people directly. And this is really the main point: the administrative burden all of these social programs incur, especially in terms of labor and office space, means that a very large sum of money is going into these programs that will never be seen by the people who need help. Just give everyone a check and be done with it. To answer your main question: the person who blows their UBI suffers. They will be hungry for the rest of the month, and not many people will have sympathy for them because they already got their check. All mentally sane people realize this reality, and that is enough to prevent them from spending their UBI poorly. For the minority of people who are sadly physically addicted to drugs, there can be social programs specifically aimed at recovery and rehabilitation. This was another one of Yang's policies. UBI would help here too: let's say you spend 8 months at a government funded rehab facility while you kick your addiction to meth or heroine. At the end of the 8 months, you have $8000 waiting for you - to go forward, get a job, rent an apartment, and rebuild your life. This is much cheaper than a bloated social program that ties your aid to measurable checkpoints, like how you have to prove you're looking for a job in order to keep receiving unemployment. Under UBI, the Fed just runs some script every month to raise a double somewhere by $1000; under unemployment they have to hire people to process your application, approve/deny it, review your weekly application submissions, hire someone else to distribute the money, hire a manager for all these people, pay an office to give these people a workplace, pay pensions and benefits for all these employees, etc.

misun78 6y ago
If that’s the core argument for UBI i.e. it’s far more efficient, why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? Your analysis should theoretically support a net decrease in spending on welfare (hence lower taxes) or best case, no additional increase. You would have a lot broader support if UBI wasn’t tied to egregious tax proposals like a wealth tax.
- agd621 6y ago
  I’d guess that’s where the 5 million from Dorsey comes in. Figure the dollar amounts for replacing certain services. (I didn’t read the article, appologies If I’m way off.)
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > If that’s the core argument for UBI i.e. it’s far more efficient, why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? This is really just a framing issue. The way existing programs work, you get $12,000 in food stamps and housing assistance and student loan interest subsidies etc., and then they phase out at higher incomes. With a UBI, everybody gets it, unconditionally. The "phase out" is taxes. You get $12,000, but by the time you've made e.g. $60,000/year in income, you've paid $12,000 in taxes to fund the UBI, and it cancels out. Opponents paint this as you've paid $12,000 more in taxes, but really it nets to zero. Meanwhile the person making $80,000 might "pay $16,000" in taxes, but it's really only $4000 because they still get the $12,000 UBI. It's the same as having $12,000 in benefits which phase out below your income level, except that the accounting is much clearer so that you can easily see what the true marginal rates everyone is paying are, and you can't accidentally create ridiculous marginal rate cliffs by having independent programs phase out in the same place.
- nexuist 6y ago
  > why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? This depends on your definition of "population." If you consider billion dollar multinationals as part of the population, then yes, there are significant tax increases. You mention a wealth tax - first off, that's not a Yang policy, and I'm not aware of any prominent politicians pushing a wealth tax and UBI at the same time. However even if we consider Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, that only kicks in once you start making over $50M / year, and there just aren't many people doing that. Is it really a significant increase if it only targets a few thousand people out of 330 million? > Your analysis should theoretically support a net decrease in spending on welfare Not exactly. It supports a net decrease in spending on welfare administration. Plenty of people, especially those leaning right-wing / libertarian / "small government", absolutely loathe the idea of useless government jobs, even though they would agree with purpose of the program (i.e. feeding the homeless, paying out unemployment, taking care of the elderly, etc.) Even though spending would go up (although not really on the individual level, as AnthonyMouse points out), the political popularity of UBI would far surpass that of any individual social program, ensuring that it stays around for a long time and remains untampered. We are finding out how critical this is now, where states like New Jersey ended up having garbage unemployment programs due to ineffective management and states like Florida purposefully made applying for unemployment as difficult as possible to dissuade people from trying (to make their labor force numbers look better). The only social programs that have this "legendary" reputation among the public that protects them appear to be Social Security and Medicare: nobody can run and win on a platform aimed at destructing either. Destructing UBI would also be very difficult: people tend to get very angry when you promise to pay them, and then don't!

misun78 6y ago

If that’s the core argument for UBI i.e. it’s far more efficient, why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? Your analysis should theoretically support a net decrease in spending on welfare (hence lower taxes) or best case, no additional increase. You would have a lot broader support if UBI wasn’t tied to egregious tax proposals like a wealth tax.

agd621 6y ago
I’d guess that’s where the 5 million from Dorsey comes in. Figure the dollar amounts for replacing certain services. (I didn’t read the article, appologies If I’m way off.)
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> If that’s the core argument for UBI i.e. it’s far more efficient, why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? This is really just a framing issue. The way existing programs work, you get $12,000 in food stamps and housing assistance and student loan interest subsidies etc., and then they phase out at higher incomes. With a UBI, everybody gets it, unconditionally. The "phase out" is taxes. You get $12,000, but by the time you've made e.g. $60,000/year in income, you've paid $12,000 in taxes to fund the UBI, and it cancels out. Opponents paint this as you've paid $12,000 more in taxes, but really it nets to zero. Meanwhile the person making $80,000 might "pay $16,000" in taxes, but it's really only $4000 because they still get the $12,000 UBI. It's the same as having $12,000 in benefits which phase out below your income level, except that the accounting is much clearer so that you can easily see what the true marginal rates everyone is paying are, and you can't accidentally create ridiculous marginal rate cliffs by having independent programs phase out in the same place.
nexuist 6y ago
> why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? This depends on your definition of "population." If you consider billion dollar multinationals as part of the population, then yes, there are significant tax increases. You mention a wealth tax - first off, that's not a Yang policy, and I'm not aware of any prominent politicians pushing a wealth tax and UBI at the same time. However even if we consider Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, that only kicks in once you start making over $50M / year, and there just aren't many people doing that. Is it really a significant increase if it only targets a few thousand people out of 330 million? > Your analysis should theoretically support a net decrease in spending on welfare Not exactly. It supports a net decrease in spending on welfare administration. Plenty of people, especially those leaning right-wing / libertarian / "small government", absolutely loathe the idea of useless government jobs, even though they would agree with purpose of the program (i.e. feeding the homeless, paying out unemployment, taking care of the elderly, etc.) Even though spending would go up (although not really on the individual level, as AnthonyMouse points out), the political popularity of UBI would far surpass that of any individual social program, ensuring that it stays around for a long time and remains untampered. We are finding out how critical this is now, where states like New Jersey ended up having garbage unemployment programs due to ineffective management and states like Florida purposefully made applying for unemployment as difficult as possible to dissuade people from trying (to make their labor force numbers look better). The only social programs that have this "legendary" reputation among the public that protects them appear to be Social Security and Medicare: nobody can run and win on a platform aimed at destructing either. Destructing UBI would also be very difficult: people tend to get very angry when you promise to pay them, and then don't!