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I don't think anyone is doubting that giving people money improves their lives. That seems to be the conclusion of these studies. However what is seemingly _nev

I don't think anyone is doubting that giving people money improves their lives. That seems to be the conclusion of these studies. However what is seemingly _never_ studied is how to finance such an operation. The money has to come out of the system somewhere. Is it with new taxation on XYZ, or slashing services somewhere else etc.

TriangleEdge 3y ago
> The money has to come out of the system somewhere. Governments have the ability to print money out of thin air. What I'd like to see is how UBI impacts inflation and economic growth.
- hosteur 3y ago
  Currency yes. But not value.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Google "hyperinflation." Printing money out of thin air causes the existing money to be worth about as much as toilet paper.
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    Depends on how much you print, and what happens with supply as you do so. Some countries (eg. Japan) are struggling to increase inflation, so this seems like a straightforward policy. At the same time it can solve the problem of weak consumer demand: productive factories making desirable goods that citizens nonetheless feel too poor to buy, causing those factories to shut down, resulting in the country getting poorer in real terms. After all, "demand" is desirability times spending power: if spending power is low in your target market, then demand is low, even when your products are desirable. Putting money in the hands of the largest number of people works well with production economies of scale. For the same total quantity of money, having it concentrated in a few hands means your society is incentivized to produce a few yachts and private jets, and too low on the quantity curve for economies of scale to make that production efficient. When that same money is distributed, the incentives are to produce large quantities of vacuum cleaners and washing machines, where mass production is very efficient, so total utility can be higher.
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    Printing money is not a useful framing device. What is useful is thinking about money sources and money sinks. As long as the (source rate - sink rate) ≅ Δvalue of goods an services, inflation is checked. "Printing money", paired with a comparable sink, is completely fine and a more useful tool than "never print money". The biggest roadblock we have when it comes to employing this tool is that our system of governance has different systems when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy that over-complicate its use.
  - jstummbillig 3y ago
    We are actually, right now, "printing money" out of thin air. The process is called "fractional reserve banking" and is a cornerstone of modern economics systems. You can of course read up on it, but, suffice to say, if we did not do it, financial systems would be extremely unergonomic. Hyperinflation is one of the things that could happen, when you do it badly, I suppose, but there is a lot of ways to get hyperinflation, if you do things badly.
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      Thank you for insulting my intelligence by assuming I don't understand fractional reserve banking. My point remains. A government does not have carte blanche to inject money into an economy without hyperinflation beyond a certain point.
      - jstummbillig 3y ago
        If you were a little more honest and a little less into making a point of being offended, you would probably find it fairly easy to concede that the statements you made in both comments are substantially different.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Both statements are true. Governments can "print money", but printing money comes with many caveats.
- stray 3y ago
  What could possibly go wrong?
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Printing money out of thin air makes existing money worth less. So it is effectively a tax by another name, you are taking the value from the people who have money now, without actually changing the balances in their bank accounts. And it's regressive, since there's no way to limit inflation to any selected demographic.
- netbioserror 3y ago
  Right. And if they can print it from thin air and just give it to everyone, then it has no actual value. Price discovery will force significant inflation on every class of product and service because that is what people will be buying with it. Its effectiveness drops with scale, which is what they are not testing. It's great that UBI works in a lab, but this experiment has been run at multiple points in history and absolutely thrashed societies every time without significant external input (conquest, exploitation, etc.). Money by definition derives its value from its scarcity relative to the economy it is representing. There is no free lunch here.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Yeah, as much as I hate the inefficiency of some wellfare programs in the USA - their inefficiency is a feature in that it provides a kind of scarcity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lenkite 3y ago
  The folks down-voting you down appear to have no problems with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on War every year - the money for that was printed out of thin air. The current U.S. Biden administration even removed the debt ceiling to do this!
  - vharuck 3y ago
    The US has raised the debt ceiling multiple times across multiple administrations. And the debt ceiling isn't raised so that we can pass a specific bill or take a specific action, it's so we can pay for the bills and actions we agreed to months beforehand.
stray 3y ago
Or how increasing the money supply affects the price of eggs...
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  Considering the price of eggs skyrocketed due to an outbreak of avian flu forcing farmers into mass culling tens of millions of egg laying hens across the US, it's probably not the money supply that caused that.
  - stray 3y ago
    Whoosh! Ok, the price of literally everything, then. Google "Weimar Republic".
    - op00to 3y ago
      Oh, they had UBI then?
      - stray 3y ago
        They increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices...
kevingadd 3y ago
Money isn't zero sum. We've never let such concerns interfere with funding wars.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  This isn’t an argument. What do you say to someone who doesn’t think ubi will scale and who is also anti war?
  - riskable 3y ago
    Just declare a war on needless bureaucracy or something. No need for actual violence.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    I'd have to see their argument. A basic "better things aren't possible because where will the money come from?" Isn't possible to engage with seriously. We don't fund our state with gold mines.
- virissimo 3y ago
  There absolutely is a tradeoff between defense and civilian spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model
- FredPret 3y ago
  Yes we have? There's an ongoing funding crisis for Ukraine's defense, and there are legions of conservatives who are mad about the trillion + spent blowing up Afghanistan + Iraq. Taxation in the US came about to fund a war. Money is in the top-three concerns people have about war; it's right after lives lost and infrastructure destroyed.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    You're saying people are mad about war funding. I'm saying the wars and dod get funded every year no matter what. Both things are true.
sodality2 3y ago
I’ve seen proponents suggest we take the money from other welfare programs, as paradoxically the means-testing overhead costs so much that we can afford to pay everyone $X instead of thousands of workers to process thousands of welfare applications. I haven’t seen specific numbers about this though. Edit: I'm failing to find numbers to support this now.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  I hate welfare programs as much as the next libertarian leaning conservative, but overhead from means testing (and admin overhead generally) really isn't a major expense. Medicaid overhead is a grand total of 5% of the program. It's really just UBI advocates handwaving away the question of funding.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    The cost of means testing isn't just what you see on a budget. It's also all of the people who are eligible, but incapable of demonstrating that fact because of some byzantine requirements imposed on them to show eligibility[0]. There will, of course, be people who consider this to be a feature, not a bug. That's an ideological difference outside the scope of this comment. [0] Source: I know someone applying for long-term disability. Getting an answer to a question as straightforward as how to sign the paperwork (wet signature, digital, print/sign/scan, fax?!) has been a challenge for them. It's also unclear if the three different signatures needed of them are even to be done the same way. This is a generally competent, functional person I'm talking about, by the way.
    - HideousKojima 3y ago
      That's not a "cost" of means testing though, at least not in the accounting sense. If anything, that causes the program to spend less money. Like you said, whether or not otherwise qualifying people get excluded from a welfare program is a good or bad thing is up for debate, but if it has any effect on the cost of a welfare program it only reduces it.
danpalmer 3y ago
> I don't think anyone is doubting that giving people money improves their lives. I think this is actually more controversial than you're giving it credit for. Giving money as opposed to other non-monetary forms of aid is quite a radical concept. Many people believe that giving money to the poor results in bad financial decisions, short term spending, and few long-term effects. This is the main belief that the trials of UBI so far have disproven. Another example of this is charitable giving. Most charities tackling poverty focus on giving food, water, medicine, etc, whereas studies have shown that giving money is a remarkably efficient way of donating. Give Directly has done very well with this.
anon25783 3y ago
The GDP of the USA is about 28 trillion dollars. The US military's budget alone is over eight hundred billion dollars. I think we can manage.
- dandy23 3y ago
  That would mean around 2000 USD per person per year if taking the full US military budget and paying everyone. But this is much better than subsidizing home ownership for the rich.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  Please try to do some actual math here. What annual UBI are you targeting, and how much could be funded from pillaging existing spending vs. new taxes?
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  We did this during the pandemic and it resulted in inflation that we're still trying to deal with. Exactly the kind of inflation that detractors claim would happen. Safety net, yes. UBI and other redistributionist fantasies, no.
racl101 3y ago
> or slashing services somewhere else Military budget?
- radicaldreamer 3y ago
  Military is actually a big jobs program itself, both for people directly employed by the military as well as for industrial contractors.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Any sufficiently large purchase is indistinguishable from a jobs program.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> Is it with new taxation on XYZ Bring back the 70% corporate tax rate that was considered normal when Reagan was elected. That should give us a solid start. After that take all the money from every billionaire. You can have up to $999,999,999.99 in your bank + assets, and everything after that goes to healthcare and UBI. If you get to a billion, we'll name a dog park after you and you get a little trophy that says you won capitalism. More importantly though, why is it that the funding of vast government expenditure is only a problem when it stands to benefit the working class? We always have heaps of money for tax cuts for the wealthy, blowing shit up overseas, and buying this year's crop of tanks to replace the ones we're about to shove into a field to rust. How many millions in PPI loans were forgiven, when most people got maybe $2,400 total over COVID when the economy damn near imploded?
- FredPret 3y ago
  70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. This is bad for the middle-class consumer because they'll have less to buy, and fewer places to work at. Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entire wealth of all the billionaires, that's only $12T [1]. Sounds like a lot? It's a whopping $1500 per person in the world. You'll completely obliterate the economy for the ability to give everyone a check for $1500. One month later, 95% of that money will be spent and back in the hands of innovators and value providers. [1] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > 70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. What do you mean? We still have Reagans, they never went away. > It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. Right America wasn’t even remotely an economic power until the 80’s. How could I forget? > Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entire wealth of all the billionaires, that's only $12T [1]. Sounds like a lot? It's a whopping $1500 per person in the world. You'll completely obliterate the economy for the ability to give everyone a check for $1500. One month later, 95% of that money will be spent and back in the hands of innovators and value providers. It’s not confiscating, it’s tax. Tax everything above one billion at 100%. It’s not one time, it’s every year. And it’s not like we wouldn’t still have incredibly rich people, we just wouldn’t be permitting them to lock up entire GDPs worth of money in nothing. Like if you think there are tons of people out there who will refuse to create businesses because we cap wealth at a mere, paltry one billion dollars, I think that’s a those people problem not an argument against that idea.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Also, I'm curious about the tipping point from local basic income, to universal basic income. How is that not just asking for inflation?
Acebulf 3y ago
The thing that I question is why is this requirement for this fiscal balancing only required for giving money to poor people? In 2018, the US Government added $2 trillion to the US national debt to give a 5k/capita/year subsidy to the top 5% of earners. If we're already in the business of chucking money at people in fiscally irresponsible ways, I don't see why changing the target from "rich people" or "oil companies" to "everyone" is suddenly a problem.
chimprich 3y ago
> However what is seemingly _never_ studied is how to finance such an operation You haven't understood the concept of UBI. It doesn't have to be "financed". It's a different way of assigning tax and benefits. E.g. imagine a population of only two people, Alice and Bob. Currently Alice pays £100 in tax, and Bob receives £50 in welfare payments because he's unemployed. You could set up a UBI scheme to be net zero. Under this UBI system, Alice would pay £150 in tax, and receive £50 in UBI. Bob would receive £50 in UBI instead of benefits. It doesn't have to cost anything (in theory). You could make it redistributive, but it doesn't have to be. The proponents of UBI would say it's worth it because you wouldn't have the expense and unfairness of means testing for benefits, and Bob would have the incentive to look for work (any work) without any reduction in benefits. In addition people could do things like start companies on a small guaranteed wage with less risk. Opposers of UBI would say some proportion of people wouldn't work at all if they were guaranteed an income. There are likely many more advantages and disadvantages that would only become apparent if a country actually tried it.
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  I mean with progressive tax brackets it'd be redistributive even if everyone got the same exact payments

TriangleEdge 3y ago

> The money has to come out of the system somewhere. Governments have the ability to print money out of thin air. What I'd like to see is how UBI impacts inflation and economic growth.

hosteur 3y ago
Currency yes. But not value.
psunavy03 3y ago
Google "hyperinflation." Printing money out of thin air causes the existing money to be worth about as much as toilet paper.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  Depends on how much you print, and what happens with supply as you do so. Some countries (eg. Japan) are struggling to increase inflation, so this seems like a straightforward policy. At the same time it can solve the problem of weak consumer demand: productive factories making desirable goods that citizens nonetheless feel too poor to buy, causing those factories to shut down, resulting in the country getting poorer in real terms. After all, "demand" is desirability times spending power: if spending power is low in your target market, then demand is low, even when your products are desirable. Putting money in the hands of the largest number of people works well with production economies of scale. For the same total quantity of money, having it concentrated in a few hands means your society is incentivized to produce a few yachts and private jets, and too low on the quantity curve for economies of scale to make that production efficient. When that same money is distributed, the incentives are to produce large quantities of vacuum cleaners and washing machines, where mass production is very efficient, so total utility can be higher.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Printing money is not a useful framing device. What is useful is thinking about money sources and money sinks. As long as the (source rate - sink rate) ≅ Δvalue of goods an services, inflation is checked. "Printing money", paired with a comparable sink, is completely fine and a more useful tool than "never print money". The biggest roadblock we have when it comes to employing this tool is that our system of governance has different systems when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy that over-complicate its use.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  We are actually, right now, "printing money" out of thin air. The process is called "fractional reserve banking" and is a cornerstone of modern economics systems. You can of course read up on it, but, suffice to say, if we did not do it, financial systems would be extremely unergonomic. Hyperinflation is one of the things that could happen, when you do it badly, I suppose, but there is a lot of ways to get hyperinflation, if you do things badly.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    Thank you for insulting my intelligence by assuming I don't understand fractional reserve banking. My point remains. A government does not have carte blanche to inject money into an economy without hyperinflation beyond a certain point.
    - jstummbillig 3y ago
      If you were a little more honest and a little less into making a point of being offended, you would probably find it fairly easy to concede that the statements you made in both comments are substantially different.
danpalmer 3y ago
Both statements are true. Governments can "print money", but printing money comes with many caveats.
stray 3y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
SoftTalker 3y ago
Printing money out of thin air makes existing money worth less. So it is effectively a tax by another name, you are taking the value from the people who have money now, without actually changing the balances in their bank accounts. And it's regressive, since there's no way to limit inflation to any selected demographic.
netbioserror 3y ago
Right. And if they can print it from thin air and just give it to everyone, then it has no actual value. Price discovery will force significant inflation on every class of product and service because that is what people will be buying with it. Its effectiveness drops with scale, which is what they are not testing. It's great that UBI works in a lab, but this experiment has been run at multiple points in history and absolutely thrashed societies every time without significant external input (conquest, exploitation, etc.). Money by definition derives its value from its scarcity relative to the economy it is representing. There is no free lunch here.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Yeah, as much as I hate the inefficiency of some wellfare programs in the USA - their inefficiency is a feature in that it provides a kind of scarcity.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lenkite 3y ago
The folks down-voting you down appear to have no problems with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on War every year - the money for that was printed out of thin air. The current U.S. Biden administration even removed the debt ceiling to do this!
- vharuck 3y ago
  The US has raised the debt ceiling multiple times across multiple administrations. And the debt ceiling isn't raised so that we can pass a specific bill or take a specific action, it's so we can pay for the bills and actions we agreed to months beforehand.

stray 3y ago

Or how increasing the money supply affects the price of eggs...

CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Considering the price of eggs skyrocketed due to an outbreak of avian flu forcing farmers into mass culling tens of millions of egg laying hens across the US, it's probably not the money supply that caused that.
- stray 3y ago
  Whoosh! Ok, the price of literally everything, then. Google "Weimar Republic".
  - op00to 3y ago
    Oh, they had UBI then?
    - stray 3y ago
      They increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices, so they increased the money supply which led to increased prices...

kevingadd 3y ago

Money isn't zero sum. We've never let such concerns interfere with funding wars.

pfannkuchen 3y ago
This isn’t an argument. What do you say to someone who doesn’t think ubi will scale and who is also anti war?
- riskable 3y ago
  Just declare a war on needless bureaucracy or something. No need for actual violence.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  I'd have to see their argument. A basic "better things aren't possible because where will the money come from?" Isn't possible to engage with seriously. We don't fund our state with gold mines.
virissimo 3y ago
There absolutely is a tradeoff between defense and civilian spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model
FredPret 3y ago
Yes we have? There's an ongoing funding crisis for Ukraine's defense, and there are legions of conservatives who are mad about the trillion + spent blowing up Afghanistan + Iraq. Taxation in the US came about to fund a war. Money is in the top-three concerns people have about war; it's right after lives lost and infrastructure destroyed.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  You're saying people are mad about war funding. I'm saying the wars and dod get funded every year no matter what. Both things are true.

sodality2 3y ago

I’ve seen proponents suggest we take the money from other welfare programs, as paradoxically the means-testing overhead costs so much that we can afford to pay everyone $X instead of thousands of workers to process thousands of welfare applications. I haven’t seen specific numbers about this though. Edit: I'm failing to find numbers to support this now.

HideousKojima 3y ago
I hate welfare programs as much as the next libertarian leaning conservative, but overhead from means testing (and admin overhead generally) really isn't a major expense. Medicaid overhead is a grand total of 5% of the program. It's really just UBI advocates handwaving away the question of funding.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  The cost of means testing isn't just what you see on a budget. It's also all of the people who are eligible, but incapable of demonstrating that fact because of some byzantine requirements imposed on them to show eligibility[0]. There will, of course, be people who consider this to be a feature, not a bug. That's an ideological difference outside the scope of this comment. [0] Source: I know someone applying for long-term disability. Getting an answer to a question as straightforward as how to sign the paperwork (wet signature, digital, print/sign/scan, fax?!) has been a challenge for them. It's also unclear if the three different signatures needed of them are even to be done the same way. This is a generally competent, functional person I'm talking about, by the way.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    That's not a "cost" of means testing though, at least not in the accounting sense. If anything, that causes the program to spend less money. Like you said, whether or not otherwise qualifying people get excluded from a welfare program is a good or bad thing is up for debate, but if it has any effect on the cost of a welfare program it only reduces it.

danpalmer 3y ago

> I don't think anyone is doubting that giving people money improves their lives. I think this is actually more controversial than you're giving it credit for. Giving money as opposed to other non-monetary forms of aid is quite a radical concept. Many people believe that giving money to the poor results in bad financial decisions, short term spending, and few long-term effects. This is the main belief that the trials of UBI so far have disproven. Another example of this is charitable giving. Most charities tackling poverty focus on giving food, water, medicine, etc, whereas studies have shown that giving money is a remarkably efficient way of donating. Give Directly has done very well with this.

anon25783 3y ago

The GDP of the USA is about 28 trillion dollars. The US military's budget alone is over eight hundred billion dollars. I think we can manage.

dandy23 3y ago
That would mean around 2000 USD per person per year if taking the full US military budget and paying everyone. But this is much better than subsidizing home ownership for the rich.
HideousKojima 3y ago
Please try to do some actual math here. What annual UBI are you targeting, and how much could be funded from pillaging existing spending vs. new taxes?
slowmovintarget 3y ago
We did this during the pandemic and it resulted in inflation that we're still trying to deal with. Exactly the kind of inflation that detractors claim would happen. Safety net, yes. UBI and other redistributionist fantasies, no.

racl101 3y ago

> or slashing services somewhere else Military budget?

radicaldreamer 3y ago
Military is actually a big jobs program itself, both for people directly employed by the military as well as for industrial contractors.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Any sufficiently large purchase is indistinguishable from a jobs program.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

> Is it with new taxation on XYZ Bring back the 70% corporate tax rate that was considered normal when Reagan was elected. That should give us a solid start. After that take all the money from every billionaire. You can have up to $999,999,999.99 in your bank + assets, and everything after that goes to healthcare and UBI. If you get to a billion, we'll name a dog park after you and you get a little trophy that says you won capitalism. More importantly though, why is it that the funding of vast government expenditure is only a problem when it stands to benefit the working class? We always have heaps of money for tax cuts for the wealthy, blowing shit up overseas, and buying this year's crop of tanks to replace the ones we're about to shove into a field to rust. How many millions in PPI loans were forgiven, when most people got maybe $2,400 total over COVID when the economy damn near imploded?

FredPret 3y ago
70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. This is bad for the middle-class consumer because they'll have less to buy, and fewer places to work at. Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entire wealth of all the billionaires, that's only $12T [1]. Sounds like a lot? It's a whopping $1500 per person in the world. You'll completely obliterate the economy for the ability to give everyone a check for $1500. One month later, 95% of that money will be spent and back in the hands of innovators and value providers. [1] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > 70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. What do you mean? We still have Reagans, they never went away. > It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. Right America wasn’t even remotely an economic power until the 80’s. How could I forget? > Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entire wealth of all the billionaires, that's only $12T [1]. Sounds like a lot? It's a whopping $1500 per person in the world. You'll completely obliterate the economy for the ability to give everyone a check for $1500. One month later, 95% of that money will be spent and back in the hands of innovators and value providers. It’s not confiscating, it’s tax. Tax everything above one billion at 100%. It’s not one time, it’s every year. And it’s not like we wouldn’t still have incredibly rich people, we just wouldn’t be permitting them to lock up entire GDPs worth of money in nothing. Like if you think there are tons of people out there who will refuse to create businesses because we cap wealth at a mere, paltry one billion dollars, I think that’s a those people problem not an argument against that idea.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Also, I'm curious about the tipping point from local basic income, to universal basic income. How is that not just asking for inflation?

Acebulf 3y ago

The thing that I question is why is this requirement for this fiscal balancing only required for giving money to poor people? In 2018, the US Government added $2 trillion to the US national debt to give a 5k/capita/year subsidy to the top 5% of earners. If we're already in the business of chucking money at people in fiscally irresponsible ways, I don't see why changing the target from "rich people" or "oil companies" to "everyone" is suddenly a problem.

chimprich 3y ago

> However what is seemingly _never_ studied is how to finance such an operation You haven't understood the concept of UBI. It doesn't have to be "financed". It's a different way of assigning tax and benefits. E.g. imagine a population of only two people, Alice and Bob. Currently Alice pays £100 in tax, and Bob receives £50 in welfare payments because he's unemployed. You could set up a UBI scheme to be net zero. Under this UBI system, Alice would pay £150 in tax, and receive £50 in UBI. Bob would receive £50 in UBI instead of benefits. It doesn't have to cost anything (in theory). You could make it redistributive, but it doesn't have to be. The proponents of UBI would say it's worth it because you wouldn't have the expense and unfairness of means testing for benefits, and Bob would have the incentive to look for work (any work) without any reduction in benefits. In addition people could do things like start companies on a small guaranteed wage with less risk. Opposers of UBI would say some proportion of people wouldn't work at all if they were guaranteed an income. There are likely many more advantages and disadvantages that would only become apparent if a country actually tried it.

entropicdrifter 3y ago
I mean with progressive tax brackets it'd be redistributive even if everyone got the same exact payments