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The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservativ

The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservative approach and not UBI?

sokoloff 4y ago
The problem is math; there are ~307 million citizens, around 75% of those over the age of 18, plus 23 million non-citizen residents of the US. Even taking a pretty conservative approach of only paying $1K/mo UBI to the citizens over the age of 18, that's 307M * .75 * $1K * 12 or $2.75T. US Federal tax revenue for 2021 was just over $4T. So, even with a fairly paltry UBI, you're talking about UBI representing an increase of taxes of almost 70% of total federal taxes. Make the UBI $1500/mo per adult citizen and UBI costs more than every dollar of federal tax received currently. Pay the $1K UBI to every resident of the US and UBI represents basically 100% of current federal tax receipts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xracy 4y ago
  It's interesting to me, because it doesn't seem that hard or wrong to tax stagnant dollars. And I suspect it would solve a lot of the inflation woes that might happen with UBI, as well as a lot of the US economic woes. Every time we look at fixing an issue like this, it seems like we're only looking at the half of the problem that involves creating the benefit, because paying for it is unpopular. But wealth accrual in this economy is a net drag. The tax side of trickle-down means that we're only ever working with a trickle to power major public benefits that could otherwise consistently run our economy, and provide robustness where we have a lot of weakness. You could pay for UBI by heavily taxing stock portfolios of the richest people. + 10% tax on the richest 1% of stock portfolios would raise about 2.3T (source CNBC). It would also take money from people who "can't spend it all" (something Bezos has literally claimed, he has trouble with), and give it to the 300M people who actually have something to spend it on, as evidenced by the huge boom in the economy created by the stimulus package. It's not that you can't find the money to tax this, it's that no one has the political will to tax anything.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I think the arguments that a federal wealth tax would be unconstitutional are far stronger than the (IMO, fairly tortured logic) arguments that say it would be constitutional. In any case, I’d expect them to be strong enough to cause a substantial delay while that gets figured out (and even longer/possibly never if an amendment is needed).
  - DougN7 4y ago
    I’m not sure you can extract $4 trillion over and over, year after year. Maybe once or twice. Maybe.
    - xracy 4y ago
      Yeah, cause GDP will definitely just stop growing once you've extracted the $4T. Taxes disappear into a hole you can never get them out of once they've been spent. The stimulus money has famously halted the economy in its tracks. The point I'm making is that the problem is there's a lot of stagnant dollars providing no value to us, that you could readily reinvest in something like this. Also, before someone brings up inflation in response, I will point out the reason inflation is rampant, is we're not pulling the money out of the economy at the same rate we're putting it in...
- maxerickson 4y ago
  If you earn $75,000 privately and pay, say $20,000 in tax and then the government institutes a UBI of $15,000 and increases your taxes to $35,000, the only change you are likely to see is an increase in competition for some types of goods and services. It's really odd to stand on the pretense that the UBI wouldn't (effectively anyway) be taxed.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Of course it would be taxed. The math is laid out because many people seem to think this is couch cushion money. Today, about 57% of households pay no net federal individual income tax. That figure would only increase with UBI implemented as a negative income tax. Maybe it seems reasonable to some for the median household to receive money from the feds on top of the services they get today for free. That doesn’t seem stable and sustainable to me, neither economically nor politically.
logicalmonster 4y ago
> The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservative approach and not UBI? Perhaps this would be a more convincing argument if the article proposed some way to pay for UBI other than handwaving it away through more taxation. For context: you could take literally every penny doled out to the military industrial complex and throw it into UBI and it would barely put a dent in that overall cost.

The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservative approach and not UBI?

sokoloff 4y ago

The problem is math; there are ~307 million citizens, around 75% of those over the age of 18, plus 23 million non-citizen residents of the US. Even taking a pretty conservative approach of only paying $1K/mo UBI to the citizens over the age of 18, that's 307M * .75 * $1K * 12 or $2.75T. US Federal tax revenue for 2021 was just over $4T. So, even with a fairly paltry UBI, you're talking about UBI representing an increase of taxes of almost 70% of total federal taxes. Make the UBI $1500/mo per adult citizen and UBI costs more than every dollar of federal tax received currently. Pay the $1K UBI to every resident of the US and UBI represents basically 100% of current federal tax receipts.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xracy 4y ago
It's interesting to me, because it doesn't seem that hard or wrong to tax stagnant dollars. And I suspect it would solve a lot of the inflation woes that might happen with UBI, as well as a lot of the US economic woes. Every time we look at fixing an issue like this, it seems like we're only looking at the half of the problem that involves creating the benefit, because paying for it is unpopular. But wealth accrual in this economy is a net drag. The tax side of trickle-down means that we're only ever working with a trickle to power major public benefits that could otherwise consistently run our economy, and provide robustness where we have a lot of weakness. You could pay for UBI by heavily taxing stock portfolios of the richest people. + 10% tax on the richest 1% of stock portfolios would raise about 2.3T (source CNBC). It would also take money from people who "can't spend it all" (something Bezos has literally claimed, he has trouble with), and give it to the 300M people who actually have something to spend it on, as evidenced by the huge boom in the economy created by the stimulus package. It's not that you can't find the money to tax this, it's that no one has the political will to tax anything.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think the arguments that a federal wealth tax would be unconstitutional are far stronger than the (IMO, fairly tortured logic) arguments that say it would be constitutional. In any case, I’d expect them to be strong enough to cause a substantial delay while that gets figured out (and even longer/possibly never if an amendment is needed).
- DougN7 4y ago
  I’m not sure you can extract $4 trillion over and over, year after year. Maybe once or twice. Maybe.
  - xracy 4y ago
    Yeah, cause GDP will definitely just stop growing once you've extracted the $4T. Taxes disappear into a hole you can never get them out of once they've been spent. The stimulus money has famously halted the economy in its tracks. The point I'm making is that the problem is there's a lot of stagnant dollars providing no value to us, that you could readily reinvest in something like this. Also, before someone brings up inflation in response, I will point out the reason inflation is rampant, is we're not pulling the money out of the economy at the same rate we're putting it in...
maxerickson 4y ago
If you earn $75,000 privately and pay, say $20,000 in tax and then the government institutes a UBI of $15,000 and increases your taxes to $35,000, the only change you are likely to see is an increase in competition for some types of goods and services. It's really odd to stand on the pretense that the UBI wouldn't (effectively anyway) be taxed.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Of course it would be taxed. The math is laid out because many people seem to think this is couch cushion money. Today, about 57% of households pay no net federal individual income tax. That figure would only increase with UBI implemented as a negative income tax. Maybe it seems reasonable to some for the median household to receive money from the feds on top of the services they get today for free. That doesn’t seem stable and sustainable to me, neither economically nor politically.

logicalmonster 4y ago

> The article says "conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it", so maybe the problem is the conservative approach and not UBI? Perhaps this would be a more convincing argument if the article proposed some way to pay for UBI other than handwaving it away through more taxation. For context: you could take literally every penny doled out to the military industrial complex and throw it into UBI and it would barely put a dent in that overall cost.