7 ms·

Typical UBI trial run. Not universal. Not basic income, unless you consider $12k/yr in LA a livable income. Ends in three years, so no one can retire early or b

• TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term This sounds like a disaster. Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    > Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year. Which is less than Social Security and the federal portion of unemployment insurance. By hundreds of billions.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      But you’d keep social security and unemployment insurance and Medicare… so you’re adding trillions more in spending each year?
      • lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Why would we keep them? One of the benefits of UBI is to drastically simplify everything.
        • prepend 4y ago
          If you don’t keep them then social security beneficiaries would see a drop in benefits. And you’d lose the tax revenue from ss tax.
          • lotsofpulp 4y ago
            The “lost” tax revenue would be recouped via increased marginal income/sales taxes. But it is politically impossible because an important voting bloc is already getting disproportionate benefits and reducing their disproportion Jan of a way to win elections.
            • pkaye 4y ago
              What would happen to those who paid into social security for decades?
              • lotsofpulp 4y ago
                Same thing that is going to happen to all defined benefits, including mine. They will get inflated away. That is the beauty of benefits defined in currency. You can have the nominal amount, and you can even adjust it per a CPI, but whether or not it retains the same purchasing power is pretty much always a no.
                • pkaye 4y ago
                  I understand about inflation but would social security and pensions funds be rolled into basic income funds?
                  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
                    The feds have the power to issue money. It does not really matter what they get rolled into as long as sufficiently high marginal income/sales tax rates and estate tax rates exist so as to keep the income/wealth gap within a certain range.
  • bhawks 4y ago
    Well that's pretty much what is paid as 'income security' in 2021: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder... So maybe it's not as unreasonable as it sounds. The next question would be - are we doubling what was spent in 2021 or just swapping out the old system with the new one. Experimenting with the entire country's population and a significant fraction of its economic output seems infeasible and irresponsible. I think the ball is in team UBIs court to devise a reproducible small scale experiment with a decent hypothesis to test before a country wide rollout.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      > I think the ball is in team UBIs court to devise a reproducible small scale experiment with a decent hypothesis to test before a country wide rollout. This is impossible. The “universal” part of UBI is essential. Also, being able to tax it back in order to reduce income/wealth gap is essential, putting it in federal government territory. And, of course, immigration control, which is also federal government territory.
      • prepend 4y ago
        Is this what people mean when they say “UBI is impossible?” I think we will need some realistic experiments to gather evidence as, obviously I think, UBI can’t be rolled out in a country of hundreds of millions without evidence of success. Or at least evidence of no or minimal harm.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          Really, any broad based wealth redistribution that is not able to disproportionately benefit certain voting blocs is politically impossible. UBI lays bare all the subsidies various tribes get in an easily comparable number, which will not be sufficiently popular among active voters.
        • origin_path 4y ago
          UBI is not so much impossible as unfalsifiable: the only obvious way to test it makes it not UBI. UBI looks a lot like a minor rebranding of communist economic policy and has the same no-true-Scotsman problem in which failures are brushed off with "that's not real {UBI/communism}".
  • Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    There's many ways to make this workable. One of the most practical: Negative Income Tax (NIT) is mathematically very similar to UBI (and should have similar effects) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax I'm reminded of optimization methods, but with money instead of with RAM or CPU. You get the effect of spending all of the money, but you can do most of the work on paper. Whether the remaining cost is worth it is then a political decision, but not unworkable.
    • hnburnsy 4y ago
      This already exists in the US, its called EITC.
• tkk23 4y ago
  Why is there not a non-typical UBI trial run by those who believe in UBI? It doesn't have to be tax funded and it doesn't have to pay out in a low purchasing power country. For sure there is a 'living on one dollar a day' community that is willing to receive a UBI. That would be $400 per year. With a $4000 pledge per year, it takes 1000 people to finance a 10000 community. Add some technology transfer, and if UBI works, then the community should be able to finance its UBI by themselves after some years.
  • underyx 4y ago
    There is one: https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/