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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 Afgha

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.