13 ms·

What is the point of UBI studies this small? Giving a few hundred people extra money each month will improve the well being, no question about it. The issues w

• Avicebron 6y ago
  The most common explanation given to me is restructuring and siphoning money off of futures and taxing wealthy US companies that previously have not been paying taxes.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    While a great idea in theory, said companies are adept at moving money around to avoid paying taxes. Is it unthinkable that a company would move its HQ down to some island nation to avoid several billion in taxes? I don't think so. And there will be endless arguments about how foreign companies that don't pay into that system are going to be more competitive. One could maybe avoid the problem a bit by implementing a tariff on every import that calculates the man-hours put into a product and adds a fee based on how much UBI that would be if it were made by Americans, but that's hideously complex and still wouldn't help companies that want to export their products worldwide. Ultimately markets don't care about the general welfare of the people and are frequently at odds with schemes like this. Unfortunately we don't really have a better solution. Command economies don't work at scale.
    • Avicebron 6y ago
      It's not impossible that those companies would try, but it's not impossible that strict legal action could prevent it at least in theory. I think that if we just acknowledge markets don't care about the welfare of people than we have a commonly agreed upon problem. Should it be morally acceptable to put our hands up and say, luck of the draw, some will die deep in medical debt and others get to become horrendously wealthy. As a species I hope we have progressed enough to move past that base thinking.
      • jandrese 6y ago
        Strict legal action can't prevent them from being undercut by foreign competitors.
        • Avicebron 6y ago
          I'm not saying that there wouldn't have to be other changes to manufacturing practices, import and tariff practices, but I think the framework we go into the problem with. E.G. are people important or our markets important makes a difference in how someone comes up with a solution.
    • nikanj 6y ago
      Two can play at that game, and if the HQ is moved to a small island, the company can be hit with import tariffs. As long as the customers still remain in the US, the US can extract tax from the transactions. Not saying they're willing to extract taxes, as we've seen time and again, but very much able.
• skybrian 6y ago
  Sometimes there has been skepticism about giving people cash as a form of charity because they're worried that the money won't be well spent. (They'll spend it on drugs or alcohol or whatever.) More evidence to settle that question is useful. If we've moved beyond that to worrying about what happens at scale, that's progress.
  • dahfizz 6y ago
    Studies like this do not settle that issue for me. This study is based solely on what the participants claim they spend money on. It's a core principle of the study that the money is "no strings attached". That makes it useless as an actual study, IMO. Without a more comprehensive study of the budgets of people before and after, the idea that the money won't be spent well is a fair argument.
    • tekno45 6y ago
      But we're seeing their quality of life improve. You don't see what they spent it on, but they have found a way to spend these funds to improve their situation.
      • dahfizz 6y ago
        That wasn't the question. GP points out that that is completely obvious. Nobody would doubt that free money would make you happy without considering the economic issues of scaling the program. The issue is "are the recipients spending the money well"? Are they saving, and using the money to advance themselves, and budgeting? Or is it all going to "waste" and doing nothing productive?
        • toomuchtodo 6y ago
          Why would you target productivity over quality of life? We're already more productive than at any point in human history. The productivity is why we can optimize for quality of life, not a justification for attempting to squeeze even more productivity out of citizens.
• komali2 6y ago
  The inflation question is the most common > https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income-just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7 https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-... > basic income is not the idea of printing $3 trillion new dollars every year and dropping it on everyone from helicopters. > The money for a basic income guarantee would be already existing money circulated through the economic system. It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands. > Rising rent is a particularly worrisome fear for many when first introduced to the idea of basic income. However, two very important things in particular need to be understood when it comes to housing. > There are five times more vacant homes than homeless people in the United States today. This represents a large unused supply that need only be made available. The reason many people are not living in these homes is because they were at one time but couldn’t afford to keep them. Basic income rectifies this and puts people back in homes. > Technology represents a major factor in future housing prices, especially a future where everyone has a basic income. Everyone will receive a monthly check to afford rent, and will want to spend as little of it as possible on rent. Meanwhile, owners will want to compete for this money with other owners.
  • labcomputer 6y ago
    > There are five times more vacant homes than homeless people in the United States today. This sort of disingenuous statistic makes it very difficult to take the rest seriously. Just like there is frictional and non-frictional unemployment, there is frictional and non-frictional home vacancy. Suppose I sell my house and move out the week before the buyer moves in. The house is vacant, right? But it is not vacant in a way that is useful for housing the unhoused. The house will be occupied again in a week, and an it needs to be cleaned before the new owners take possession. The same thing happens for apartments: Old tenant moves out, landlord cleans up the place and puts it back on the market. It's technically vacant for a period of time while the apartment is cleaned and repaired, but (again) not in a way that is useful for providing shelter to people who are without homes. > This represents a large unused supply that need only be made available. This "frictional" vacancy actually makes up the vast majority of vacant homes. It can't be usefully repurposed as a permanent or semi-permanent place for people to live. The other problem is that the geographic distribution of "actually-vacant" homes may not match the geographic distribution of people who need homes, and asking people to move is a live wire in an discussion about homelessness. Circling back to the broader point about inflation: You haven't addressed it in any credible way. In particular, even if it were true that there is a vast, untapped supply of housing, I see no reason that landlords won't increase rent by approximately the monthly amount of UBI. After all, they're happy with whatever the real vacancy rate is today, and everyone would have the means to pay an additional $UBI_MONTHLY per month. Why would landlords suddenly change their tune and leave money on the table?
• SubiculumCode 6y ago
  "pay for" misunderstands how money works. Giving the benefit of the doubt, I'll take this to mean, how do we offset the inflation hypothetically caused by increasing the circulating money supply. I'd argue that a UBI would only mildly affect inflation for many goods and services, save housing, and could be effectively offset with a mild to moderate taxation.
• ivalm 6y ago
  It is paid for by a net positive tax reform. My preferred would be something along the lines of wealth tax (I don’t want to tax productivity, ie income, but I have little sympathy for passive hoarders of wealth; I understand there are major legal and logistic hurdles; my current pet approach would be something along the lines of significant interest rate increase (to make money more valuable) combined with significant quantitative easing (essentially taxing money)).
  • thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
    There isn't nearly enough wealth to make that work. I've already run the numbers on this. Even if you taxed every last billionaire in the US and stole their entire net worth and divied up all their wealth among every US citizen, it would still only be 300$ a year per person over 30 years. It doesn't work. The problem with the world isn't distribution of wealth. The problem is NOT enough wealth in the first place. We need to concentrate on addressing that problem. Also, gov is already such an enormous burden on people in the US. Right now almost 40% of US GDP is gov spending. that means the average person is loosing 4 out of every 10$ their earning. And, that's just the average. I'm sure in coastal areas the burden is much much higher.
    • ivalm 6y ago
      Why limit to billionaires? Total net assets in the US ~ $270T, so you can pay for UBI and balance the budget with under 2% wealth tax. The real problem is how to realize this tax. I think it is probably too hard to actually appraise everything/etc; thus something like a monetary policy might be appropriate. The problem here is that USD is not in a vacuum so side effects might make this impossible.
    • rainyMammoth 6y ago
      Andrew Yang's argument is that a lot of people already receive some level of help from the state (food stamps, unemployment, etc) which would be transferred to cash instead. So you need to account for those as well.
      • 6y ago
• 11235813213455 6y ago
  I'd go in the opposite direction, no money, but free services (local organic food, bikes, and housing (water+electricity+internet), possibly a laptop too)
  • gfodor 6y ago
    The problem with this is that it undermines the end-game goal of UBI: efficient welfare powered by market forces. Any service-oriented approach would be different, and likely subject to the corrosive forces like corruption, cronyism, pork etc if deployed as national policy.
  • RangerScience 6y ago
    Perhaps a net of various social services for the safety and welfare of the people? Perhaps it could be called a "social safety net"? There are a lot of reasons why people (myself included) think that UBI would be better than the welfare system we currently have, which is (AFAIK) like what you describe. Google around. My favorite reasons to expect UBI would work "better" are: 1) drastically simplifies the government's part of the system, 2) works within the existing economic system, and 3) empowers people to make their own decisions about their own lives, needs, and wants.
    • luckylion 6y ago
      > drastically simplifies the government's part of the system But the government's part of the system is absolutely insignificant. > empowers people to make their own decisions about their own lives, needs, and wants I get that. But I also have a neighbor that will spend the cash component of the welfare he gets within the first 10 days of the month. If he got cash only and had to pay rent himself, I'm certain that he wouldn't. Obviously we can't let him be homeless, so the state would jump in and pay his rent. On top of giving him the money to pay his rent. That would obviously be an improvement for him (+700€/month to spend), but I don't see how it would be sustainable.
      • dahfizz 6y ago
        > But the government's part of the system is absolutely insignificant. The easiest data point I could find is that the Executive branch spent $228 Billion in 2010 on government salaries, excluding the military and USPS[1]. That's almost $700 per person per year if you converted it all to a UBI. That's far from insignificant. > But I also have a neighbor that will spend the cash component of the welfare he gets within the first 10 days of the month. If he got cash only and had to pay rent himself, I'm certain that he wouldn't I don't see why I am obligated to pay for someone who refuses to take care of himself. [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/how-much-money-is-spent-on-federal-workers/2011/10/26/gIQAMSLBJM_blog.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/how-mu...
• bhupy 6y ago
  > What's stopping prices from rising accordingly? Short answer: supply & demand Long answer: if the supply of a thing isn't constrained (either naturally or artificially), then prices will rise in the near term, but will settle back down in the long term as production catches up with demand. This is why giving poor people food stamps (which is just food money) doesn't necessarily increase the price of food. This mostly only breaks down in housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform. Even in regions without zoning reform, you now have people that have cash to move to cheaper neighborhoods — or even cities. > How will the ~$3T yearly UBI bill be paid for? Either progressive taxation, a VAT, or some combination thereof. I can try and give you a theoretical tax breakdown using real numbers. In 2018, the household income quintiles were as follows[1]: Lowest quintile mean: $13,775 Second quintile mean: $37,923 Third quintile mean: $63,572 Fourth quintile mean: $101,570 Highest quintile mean: $233,895 There were about 159M employed persons in the US in the most recent high[2], about 50% of the US population. We want our UBI to cover everybody. To make this simple, because quintiles comprise an equally populated group of people, let's imagine that instead of there being ~32M people per quintile, that our nation has 10 people, where 5 people don't work, and each of the remaining 5 falls into one of the quintiles. If we wanted to define a UBI of $18,000 per person, we need to somehow come up with $18,000 * 10 == $180,000 to distribute to everyone equally. If we fund this progressively, each individual would have to pay: Unemployed #1: 0 Unemployed #2: 0 Unemployed #3: 0 Unemployed #4: 0 Unemployed #5: 0 Lowest: $8,000 Second: $12,000 Third: $18,000 Fourth: $33,000 Highest: $103,000 Total revenue: $180,000 Then consider that everyone here is receiving back 18,000 under the UBI. The highest quintile earner’s net take-home is, thus 233,895-103,000+18,000 == $148,895, which effectively renders their net tax rate approx 36%. If you run this breakdown across all quintiles: Unemployed #1-5: $0 - $0 + 18,000 == $18,000 Lowest: $13,775 - $8,000 + $18,000 == $23,775 (effective tax -73%) Second: $37,923 - $12,000 + $18,000 == $43,923 (effective tax -16%) Third: $63,572 - $18,000 + $18,000 == $63,572 (effective tax 0%) Fourth: $101,570 - $33,000 + $18,000 == $86,570 (effective tax 15%) Highest: $233,895 - $103,000 + $18,000 == $148,895 (effective tax 36%) You'll notice that the top 2 pay a tax rate that’s comparable to today’s. We wouldn't necessarily need to increase everyone's taxes by the above amount, because there's some wiggle room in the Federal budget. Examples, we can probably eliminate Social Security (which would just be replaced by the UBI), Medicare (which is an in-kind donation that the UBI can be used to pay for), Medicaid (ditto), EITC/CTC (basically already a BI), and food stamps (ditto). Also notice that because the lowest quintile still ends up with more than the unemployed person after their taxes, there isn’t a disincentive to work. We can play with different levels of progressivity and generosity, but the idea is the same. We can scale up from single-person quintiles to million-person quintiles, but the percentages don't change. [1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-quintiles https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/household-income-... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons
• fny 6y ago
  You should read into Modern Monetary Theory. The government can print the money by issuing treasuries: there's no need for the money to come from anywhere. Social security can easily be paid for. Interest on debt is never a problem. The base argument is that any government that issues its own currency can never default, so it can incur large deficit spending that creates a surplus in the private economy. The difficulty is whether that surplus is put to produce growth which would offset the inflation that conjuring money creates. If everyone sits at home doing nothing, you bet inflation will happen. If it's used as a cushion, perhaps not.
  • throwsoundpop 6y ago
    > If everyone sits at home doing nothing, you bet inflation will happen Why would people sitting at home doing nothing be detrimental to growth? Growth doesn't necessarily require masses of people to do more work; it can be achieved through productivity gains, e.g. improvements in tooling, and research + development.
    • ralusek 6y ago
      That would involve them not sitting at home doing nothing...
  • bhupy 6y ago
    Question: why not abolish all taxes, then? If we can just MMT the current Federal budget, why should anyone pay taxes?
    • rapind 6y ago
      You can implement a progressive tax using UBI and a flat tax instead and thus get rid of all the loopholes and tax screwery. IMO this is what all countries should do. Corruption loves complexity.
      • hpkuarg 6y ago
        I dream of the day that a land value tax, and only a land value tax, covers all government services. In fact, one could argue that the size of government that a land value tax supports is the maximum size.
• eanzenberg 6y ago
  What, you want implementation details? I want my money now!!
• gatvol 6y ago
  Poverty costs the state as truckload, the cheapest way to solve poverty is by simply giving poor people money, other interventions have been proven to be ineffectual.
  • NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
    The total, broadly construed cost of every US anti-poverty program is less than one-third of the $3tn mentioned above. You only even get that if you include Medicaid.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Evidently that is insufficient. Also, more important than just poverty is insecurity. Not being secure in one’s ability to provide for themselves and their family, for example because of volatility in employment markets, causes all sorts of side effects. I have quite a few acquaintances who simply didn’t get into relationships or have children because they are not sure of their ability to provide the minimum level of care they think they should.
    • kaibee 6y ago
      No, you misunderstand. That's how much we're spending to decrease worst symptoms of poverty to a manageable level. The actual opportunity cost, in terms of wasted human potential is far greater, unless you believe that current US anti-poverty programs are doing a great job. (Also the ways its done now has its own share of terrible value destroying externalities, ie: the welfare cliff)
    • IanCal 6y ago
      But the figure is, frankly, a silly one. That would be the cost assuming no income tax changes at all. You can shift the tax thresholds and rates to make it a net 0 change for everyone earning over some figure.
      • NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
        I see that as the basic problem in this discussion. Proponents of UBI say "everyone will receive $X per month". When people ask "how will this be paid for?", the answer is always "changes to tax schedules, savings on social programs", but this tells us nothing without details.
• asabjorn 6y ago
  In the end money is worth nothing if no one does work for it. Low income workplaces are demonstrating the issue with UBI: people were angry at business owners for taking small business loans to keep doors open and employees preferred unemployment checks.
• Proven 6y ago
  The point is vote buying, of course.
• Drunkfoowl 6y ago
  Why are you against shuffling the budget? The single easiest way to make this work is to begin the ramp down of the military industrial complex and reallocate 75% of that budget to funding schools for ALL, UBI, and healthcare. You are smart enough to know money doesn't come from the air. We have to reallocate it.
• jjfreedom 6y ago
  If the UBI funds are taken from tax dollar (aka force) then it doesn't matter if it "works" because it's immoral. If you are saying force is moral. Then we have bigger problems than $500 a month.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    UBI funds need not be taken from tax dollars. Taxes destroy money. Central banks create money. UBIs are funded through currency devaluation. Inflation, if edge cases are properly managed with cost controls (healthcare & education) and regulation (housing), is manageable. We will print regardless (See: Japan, Fed, ECB), we're just arguing over which fiat bits end up in which accounts.
    • ghostwriter 6y ago
      Central banks only print paper, the money is created by creators of value, and about half of that volume of value is being taken away from them by taxes.
      • jopsen 6y ago
        I think GPs argument is that the demand for dollars is so high that you can print them with few repercussions (inflation).
        • toomuchtodo 6y ago
          Precisely.
          • ghostwriter 6y ago
            Inflation steals future opportunuties from those who save money, and it generally steals future from new generations to come. When a family opens a bank account for their newborn child to use it for paying for their higher education, they do it in a hope that this money will preserve its value.
• jopsen 6y ago
  > What's stopping prices from rising accordingly? I'm still on the fence about UBI. But many of the things poor people would buy with this money is: food, clothes, ordinary household supplies, electricity, phone subscription, internet, etc. Today, many of these things aren't necessarily priced based on supply/demand, at-least I rarely see prices fluctuate. I assume because our hyper-industrialized/semi-automated countries we can easily manufacturer as can be sold. So instead stuff is priced based on what the _targeted customer segment_ is willing to pay. Hence, prices might not go up just because the customer segment grows in size.
  • jopsen 6y ago
    Arguably, there are things like housing which may play out differently. UBI without regulation, or some sort of gradual phasing-in would probably not be sound :D
• lend000 6y ago
  Assuming taxes rise proportionally to cover the bill, there should be no inflation -- in fact, it would even have a slight deflationary effect (all other economic factors being equal) due to deadweight loss. Whether the nation is wealthy enough to sustain that tax load yet is uncertain. Market caps and national wealth values on paper break down when huge amounts of wealth needs to be liquidated to service new taxes. Even so, I think it probably is, with a clean restructuring of our tax brackets, but we have a lot of other debt to service first. Of course, in reality, if this ever gets legislated it will only be adding to the already staggering deficit. Whether or not the politicians whose voter bases rely on UBI can be trusted to keep the UBI at a reasonable level (i.e. enough to survive in rural areas but not going to cut it if you want to live in west Los Angeles and not have a job), is a more contentious point to me.
• valuearb 6y ago
  It will be paid for in inflation. I’m a fiscal conservative but I don’t think the inflation caused by UBI will be any worse than the inflation caused by massive deficits due to military spending and other misallocations of resources. In fact UBI might be better, given it’s spent on actual human needs rather than military hardware that is 90% useless in our present world. But UBI is still stupid. Paying people for not working is a method of producing less, ie making us poorer. I always wonder why the dorks who go around promoting UBI always seem to ignore the earned income credit, which is our best tool to reduce poverty. Why don’t they ever march to massively increase that?
  • bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Saying UBI is causing the inflation is disingenuous. It's the deficits that cause inflation. If UBI is fully paid for with new taxes, it won't cause inflation.
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      I think it would be fair to say that UBI causes inflation and to also say that taxation lowers inflation.
      • danans 6y ago
        Any government spending (whether for UBI or missile systems) not paid for with taxes increases inflation, but there are lots of countervailing forces that mitigate it, not just taxation, the largest factor perhaps being downward wage pressure on workers.
    • Proven 6y ago
      Maybe you missed the fact that government spending has made the government insolvent on all levels - from Federal to Stockton. Promises (a form of vote buying) have been much greater than taxes collected. Government budgets are almost never balanced (deficit) do that spending has been inflationary because it’s financed by debt.
  • 6y ago
• machinehermit 6y ago
  Not to mention it improves their well being exactly because they are better off relative to the people who are not getting UBI. I forget what the conjecture is called in economics that UBI would essentially all be captured by rent and housing prices. I don't have to think about it very long to see how obvious that is.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    That is only true in markets where there is an artificial supply scarcity. In markets with proper zoning reform, rents and housing prices will NOT increase over the long run. But you're right that there exists markets (like SF) where this is simply not the case. What happens there? Take your thought one step further: if everyone received $x per month, and rent and housing prices increased by $x, then in that worst case scenario, the TAM doesn't actually change, I.e. if I was able to afford a house today, I would be able to afford a house tomorrow. If I was unable to afford rent today, I would not be able to afford rent tomorrow however I would now have cash to be able to afford to move to a more affordable market. This seems like a strict win to me.
• scarmig 6y ago
  > What's stopping prices from rising accordingly? Prices for different basic necessities will rise, but not enough to counteract the value of the UBI itself. The exact amount depends on the particular price elasticities of the good in question. Everyday food is likely to be relatively minimally impacted, while low-income housing would be much moreso. In broad strokes, you'd see prices rise (to different extents) on goods low-income people disproportionately purchase, but not enough to consume the majority of the UBI grant. This isn't a particularly difficult thing to predict. > How will the ~$3T yearly UBI bill be paid for? This is the much more significant issue. I'm not sure why you discount shuffling the current budget around: because of e.g. Social Security, you already have a funding stream for most seniors' UBI. Beyond that, you'd need an broad array of steep taxes (compared to today) to pay for it. 24% of current US GDP goes toward taxation. Bump it by ~15% which brings us to the level of hellholes like Germany, Belgium, and Denmark and you get >2 trillion dollars. The exact basket of taxes used matters, but would undoubtedly be the result of a complicated political negotiation. It's fair to reserve judgment until you get the actual set of revenue streams, but obviously whatever I tell you here is meaningless until you get to the sausage making of real-life federal legislation.
  • jjeaff 6y ago
    Except social security is already not solvent and will require additional money / taxes to prop it up. So I don't think we can just meet that out.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rzwitserloot 6y ago
  Well, look at it with a macroeconomic point of view. Or, if you prefer, you, playing Civilization, with the actual economy as your world map. Money doesn't represent anything inherently - it has no meaning other than what the participants in the economy ascribe to it. It's a useful tool to enable trade. So forget about money in terms of € or £ or $ for a moment. If you want to buy a fancy new TV, someone has to mine some precious materials from the earth, someone has to melt some plastic into a nice shape, someone needs to write some software, yadayada. How do we get society to mine materials, melt the plastic, and all that, in a way that nicely optimizes happiness, productivity, and investing in the future? If 'UBI' is the right answer, then we should do this with UBI, and society can then therefore pay for it. Because if the system can productively ensure that the TVs are rolling off of the belt, and today's societies (at least in the west) seem to be economically viable, then there must be an economically viable model, too, for the UBI world. Money is just a tool; adapt the tool to properly do the job that you require of it. Don't adapt the job around the tool. Let's say you spend a lifetime driving a truck around. a long, storied career of 55 years. Sounds nice and productive, but it feels a bit pointless if someone could have spent ~100k, once, and created a robot whose running costs are maybe €500 a year and could have done your job. better, even. That trucker could be doing something more productive. Or not - society can support this trucker now, getting paid to drive a truck around. Therefore society can support the same trucker at the same level (minus 500 bucks a year) with the trucker doing nothing whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that's reality already. Right now it sure feels like society is spending a million or two on that trucker over those 55 years (a salary of €40k a year, benefits and all that, traffic accidents caused by humans on the road, and more - oof, that is easily going to hit a million, no?) - on something that a robot can do for a fraction of that. It's inefficient. How do you pay for UBI? By the gains of optimizing this stuff away. But the trucker needs a society that doesn't look down upon someone who now has no work at all, and needs a way to still get the psychological benefits that work brings. These things, too, are optimizing moves: Happy people are surely better for the economy, and 'happiness' should be a goal in its own right. Here's a simple thought: If everybody gets a UBI that is enough for the basics and a little luxury on top of that, then all jobs are themselves a luxury thing. At that point, you can start taxing all income, starting at the very first penny, at 60%. You never risk taxing the population so much they go homeless or have adverse health effects, _IF_ we posit that UBI covers all basics already. Then, making UBI affordable is a matter of tweaking the 60%. Tweak it to 90% if you have to; people are motivated to work for reasons other than money, and 10% of some number is still more money than people without a job (solely UBI) would get. Taxation, especially in europe, _WAS_ at those levels after the second world war and people just worked, so, any claims that incredibly high income tax levels means nobody would work are [citation needed]. All the research I've seen suggests 60% will more than take care of it, but it's just a number on a dial. You can rotate the dial, society isn't going to break if you crank it up. Now, how do you _politically_ make this happen? I have no idea. But busting some myths and adding more research to the pile probably helps, no?