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The amount we've spent on child tax credits and toe-dipping into UBI is a drop in the bucket compared to spending $300m/day for 20 years in Afganistan without e

The amount we've spent on child tax credits and toe-dipping into UBI is a drop in the bucket compared to spending $300m/day for 20 years in Afganistan without even breaking a sweat. Clearly we can handle this kind of spending, and more, especially if we increase tax enforcement on the top 1% of earners and gasp actually re-assess the capital gains tax to ensure that people like Jeff Bezos are paying at least 28% tax on their capital gains just like they would on regular income. These programs are also an investment in the economy that pays itself forward in the form of increased social mobility, and thus increased future tax revenue, so it is by no means a net loss. It could even be the case that every $1 invested in these kinds of programs results in more than $1 in created new tax revenue a few years down the road. This is called investing in our future. A new concept, I know.

NineStarPoint 5y ago
Assuming we count the $1,800 dollars of total stimulus last year as one years worth of UBI, that alone costs 5 times yearly (1.5 billion per day) what the Afghanistan war cost. Which is both much less money than what I would consider necessary for a useful UBI, and not even universal. Sure, we could have given out a $300 a year “UBI” instead of funding the war on terror (and that would have been a much more reasonable use of the money) but the scale of how much a true UBI would cost is preposterous. We are just not yet productive enough as a society to make it work, no amount of taxing the 1% could reasonably pay for a UBI. We definitely can and should be doing more and taxing the wealthy more than we are, but even then some things are out of reach.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  This is true, but I think when the tabulations are all finished, we'll discover that the war in Afghanistan really cost something north of $100 trillion -- we just aren't including everything we should be including in the tabulation currently. In these types of situations, it is very easy to exclude things like personnel and research going on at home supporting the war effort. It's also been politically convenient to fudge Afghanistan spending numbers for 20 years up until a few months ago, so we have no reason to expect the reported numbers are the full story. I say this as an ex-DOD civilian.

NineStarPoint 5y ago

Assuming we count the $1,800 dollars of total stimulus last year as one years worth of UBI, that alone costs 5 times yearly (1.5 billion per day) what the Afghanistan war cost. Which is both much less money than what I would consider necessary for a useful UBI, and not even universal. Sure, we could have given out a $300 a year “UBI” instead of funding the war on terror (and that would have been a much more reasonable use of the money) but the scale of how much a true UBI would cost is preposterous. We are just not yet productive enough as a society to make it work, no amount of taxing the 1% could reasonably pay for a UBI. We definitely can and should be doing more and taxing the wealthy more than we are, but even then some things are out of reach.

sam0x17 5y ago
This is true, but I think when the tabulations are all finished, we'll discover that the war in Afghanistan really cost something north of $100 trillion -- we just aren't including everything we should be including in the tabulation currently. In these types of situations, it is very easy to exclude things like personnel and research going on at home supporting the war effort. It's also been politically convenient to fudge Afghanistan spending numbers for 20 years up until a few months ago, so we have no reason to expect the reported numbers are the full story. I say this as an ex-DOD civilian.