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How is it a super easy fix? It seems extremely unaffordable. Forget incentive to work. The US had a tax revenue of $3.5 trillion with a population of a 330 mill
by Aerroon 6y ago
How is it a super easy fix? It seems extremely unaffordable. Forget incentive to work. The US had a tax revenue of $3.5 trillion with a population of a 330 million. You shut down the entire government and spend it on UBI. That's $883 per person per month.
But it's worse than that. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air. Money might, but money only matters insofar as what you can spend it on. If only 300 million apples are produced then no amount of moving money around will allow everyone (330m) to get an apple. You're not poor when your dollar wealth or income is low, you're poor when you can't get the stuff you need or want.
If you want to have a UBI without sending prices of everyday goods soaring then you need cheap production of those goods in quantities that will satisfy your population. The only realistic way of doing this in the modern world is automation. The cost of production for a lot of (most?) goods comes down to how much it costs all of the human labor that's combined to produce it. Eg in the case of apples somebody has to select which apple trees to grow, acquire land, invest in it, maintain them, pick the apples, sort them, find a buyer, transport them etc. All of these require some human labor and therefore have some significant cost. The more of this you can automate the lower the costs of these apples.
Whether UBI works will ultimately come down to the efficiency of production (or alternatively, shifting the poverty to another country that does the cheap production for you, but this can't last). You need to be able to satisfy the needs of the population with the labor of the part of the population that are net tax contributors.
- leetcrew 6y agoyou're arguing a tangent to GP's point, which could be rephrased as "assuming we're already willing to spend $x on welfare, we can structure the payments in a way that effective income increases monotonically as the recipients earn higher wages for work". you can fix welfare cliffs without spending any more/less money.