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Well that's pretty much what is paid as 'income security' in 2021: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata

by 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}".

by bhawks 4y ago

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}".