4 ms·
UBI isn't "expensive". Its not a sunk cost. Its wealth redistribution, not destruction. It makes your states books look massive to implement - "wow, the governm
by zanny 6y ago
UBI isn't "expensive". Its not a sunk cost. Its wealth redistribution, not destruction. It makes your states books look massive to implement - "wow, the government is taking for trillions to cover its expenses, thats so much!" but if one of those expenses is guaranteeing the minimum standard of living to everyone that is stimulative.
Compare that to US defense spending now. Of course, 2.4 trillion a year in UBI payments is still 4x more than the US spends in the defense budget every year, but defense is a monetary black hole - the return on investment is awful because unless all the personnel and equipment commitments correlate directly to substantial amounts of economic enablement (and they really don't - the most direct example is exposing oil markets in the Middle East through occupation in recent years, but pretty much no country on Earth is lining up to pay what would functionally be protection money to the US military mob for being global police) then you build the tanks, bombs, trani the troops, run the bases, etc to do the equivalent of dig and fill ditches. There is no realized productive value in having the weapons capacity or entrenchment internationally the US military has.
That is the kind of money drain in government that can wreck a nation through siphoning of its profitable yields. Most would spend UBI on immediate goods requisite to human survival, that is a huge capitalization opportunity. Tremendous growth. The rest would be paying more in taxes than they get in UBI anyway to cover the costs.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoYes, but the government buying essentials for people in need is "stimulative" in the same way. Money goes to farmers for food, manufactures for clothing etc. People in need are still choosing and buying things in a market, but is a subset - just the essentials. The point I was trying to make is that you don't have to upend the entire economy to help people in need.