14 ms·

UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs). Instead, what we fi

UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs). Instead, what we find is that UBI recipients either spend it on essentials, stuff for their kids children or paying down debt.

endisneigh 3y ago
I don’t really have any horse in the race but the experiments I’ve seen are hardly universal nor sufficiently guaranteed. It’s basically just a one time payment spread over some period, so it’s not surprising people would use money they know won’t be around forever for essentials. On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal. I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Strictly economic theoretical speaking, inflation wouldn't happen if the money isn't "new" money, but instead is fully reallocated money. A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Money from the state does come from the money printer these days thought.
    - gumby 3y ago
      “Can”, not “does”. Don’t be disingenuous.
  - n2d4 3y ago
    That's false, "strictly economic theoretical speaking" inflation is a function of spending and savings (among others). If you take savings and use it to increase spendings, that causes demand-pull inflation.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      Very few wealthy people keep their wealth in savings. Maybe now with interest rates up it is higher, but any prudent wealth advisor will steer most of that money pile back into the economy.
      - n2d4 3y ago
        "Savings and investments" counts as one category here.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Strictly economic theoretical speaking, inflation wouldn't happen if the money isn't "new" money, but instead is fully reallocated money. Wouldn't that be in aggregate? So maybe some inflation for food and deflation for luxury yachts.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      There probably would be while the market adjusts to the new demand levels and reallocates resources accordingly. But it would level itself out.
  - dagw 3y ago
    Inflation is generally defined by the price increase of a basket of goods. If you relocate money from things outside that basket to things inside that basket then inflation can increase without the money pile getting bigger.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      Inflation is gauged by a basket of goods, not defined by it. At heart, inflation is a mismatch between the real value of the economy and the currency placeholder used to represent that. This is why governments can (and need to) keep printing money as the economy grows.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    Money supply has little to do with inflation. You can print like crazy and have about 0 inflation (a decade before Covid) or you can raise rates and have huge inflation. It's because inflation happens when supply of goods is limited. Covid messed up the supply chain -> inflation happened. Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen. If you just print and just helicopter money you will have some inflation but this doesn't happen at scale significant enough to matter in any civilized country.
    - Workaccount2 3y ago
      >(a decade before Covid) You are aware that the increase in money supply from 2020 to 2022 is about the same as the increase from 2010 to 2020, despite ~45% lower GDP growth? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
      - paulmd 3y ago
        that’s actually OP’s point, which you missed - CPI change is different from money supply change. They are related and often move together but CPI can technically go up even if money supply goes down, if the demand for money increases.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  UBI experiments have been going on for decades. Pensions, annuities, trust funds, retirement savings. People spend it on living expenses. And a few amenities if there's anything left over. Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.
tiahura 3y ago
[flagged]
- spiderfarmer 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwawa14223 3y ago
    Historically utopians have been far more dangerous.
    - spiderfarmer 3y ago
      There's a lot of leeway between advocating for gradual, realistic change and reaching for an impossible utopia.
      - throwawa14223 3y ago
        I would argue UBI is in the latter category.
        spiderfarmer 3y ago
        So, let's hear some arguments instead of ad hominems.
        throwawa14223 3y ago
        Do you consider "utopian" an ad hominem, but not "danger to democracy?"
        spiderfarmer 3y ago
        It depends. Let's test this. Presume 80% of the country wants to increase taxes for the rich and corporations, tax churches, have Universal Healthcare and a Universal Basic Income, reform your educational system, legalise abortion, make sexual education mandatory, legalise dreamers, have easier immigration and they all vote for a party who has detailed plans on how to finance and realise those ideals. How do you react?
pton_xd 3y ago
The US handed out $1.8 trillion to individuals and families and $1.7 trillion to businesses during COVID. And then a few years later began experiencing the highest inflation rate in 40 years. And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on. I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Correlation vs causation is a helluva drug
- aurareturn 3y ago
  It's mainly wealth distribution. The top percent owns too much while the bottom 80% owns too little. There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
  - pton_xd 3y ago
    > There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same. Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Communism is indeed worse, but that doesn't automatically make our current system 'good'. Yes it's the best we tried so far, but it's not like we tried soo many others and this one ended up being the best out of all the ones tested. I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have. The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.
Gormo 3y ago
> UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs). The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance. This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  The problem is, we already have that.
  - laverya 3y ago
    One of many reasons that FDR was the worst president in US history.
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      I'm talking about the ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital. At least with federal programs there's _some_ ability for the average person to influence how the program is run, even if it's abstracted through Congress and elections. The alternative is neo-feudalism.
      - Gormo 3y ago
        I don't agree that there's any substantive difference in what you're complaining about and what you're proposing as a solution. The scenario in both cases is people being dependent for essential livelihood on organizations administered by strangers with their own motives. However, the status quo reality doesn't fully reflect what you're complaining about, because the "ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital" is something that is distributed widely across society, with a vast plurality of institutions and communities, having varying and often opposing motivations, all having the capacity to independently develop their own capital. Conversely, the political state is a single institution with structural incentives that converge toward a single set of objectives, and no, the electoral process is not a sufficient mechanism of accountability. Effectively, what you are arguing for is taking the pattern that you find unfavorable in the first place, and putting it under the control of a single centralized monopoly with insufficient safeguards against abuse.
bko 3y ago
Didn't we have an experiment with ubi during COVID. Everyone basically got a big check. You can see the huge impact it has on savings. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that but what I noticed it coincided with is a huge run up in asset prices (especially speculative things like crypto), and to eventually led to broad consumer inflation. Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/
mc32 3y ago
I believe many of these UBI experiments were also advocated by different billionaires. One idealistic group and one pessimistic group. Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense). For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
I'd say the biggest expected problem is massive inflation.
endominus 3y ago
As a critic of UBI, that's not what I expect at all. I expect all of these tests to have wonderful outcomes where people who get their share are able to make good choices, invest in their future, and become better off than their neighbors. I expect that this will always be the case for any test done with UBI, because I understand that these tests are modelling a situation fundamentally different from what would happen if the basic income granted were actually universal - publicly known and guaranteed by the government. In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation. What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning. True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why. Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't. Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely. [0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealth-mobility-is-low-and-decreases-with-age/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...
jackcviers3 3y ago
How does UBI avoid encouraging excessive inflation on basic goods? If there are more people to afford them, then surely demand will rise and supply will decrease, driving prices up until UBI must rise to compensate.
bluecalm 3y ago
Yeah and if you get a blowjob for free every morning your life is going to be better as well. The problem is someone needs to be forced to provide it. That's about how much those experiments are worth.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  To extend the already really tortured analogy, we've got people who've managed to hoard many billions of... willing blowjob givers? And we've got people who... die from lack of blowjobs.
  - bluecalm 3y ago
    I mean, even if you take all the billionaires money and somehow liquidate it in efficient way it will only be enough for basic income of 500$/month for about 30 months (in USA). It's not like you can turn Tesla into housing for the poor though with any kind of efficiency so even that scenario is very unlikely. If you want UBI long term you would need to heavily tax the middle class - people who work a lot and provide value every day. This is what always happens with such programs and happened in my country as well (where the UBI was very limited to 125$/month and only given per child). It's easy to point into "evil billionaires" and say to take for them but in reality you need to take a lot more from a guy who built his career for 15+ years and is now a doctor or a programmer or a small business owner. This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      "It's either the billionaires or the middle class" leaves out a pretty vast swath between 0.1M and 999M. > This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make. In theory, on paper, without any fiddles. In practice... nah. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lower-tax-rates-many-ordinary-americans/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lowe... "A study by White House economists released on September 23 found that the 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018."

endisneigh 3y ago

I don’t really have any horse in the race but the experiments I’ve seen are hardly universal nor sufficiently guaranteed. It’s basically just a one time payment spread over some period, so it’s not surprising people would use money they know won’t be around forever for essentials. On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal. I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.

Workaccount2 3y ago
Strictly economic theoretical speaking, inflation wouldn't happen if the money isn't "new" money, but instead is fully reallocated money. A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Money from the state does come from the money printer these days thought.
  - gumby 3y ago
    “Can”, not “does”. Don’t be disingenuous.
- n2d4 3y ago
  That's false, "strictly economic theoretical speaking" inflation is a function of spending and savings (among others). If you take savings and use it to increase spendings, that causes demand-pull inflation.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Very few wealthy people keep their wealth in savings. Maybe now with interest rates up it is higher, but any prudent wealth advisor will steer most of that money pile back into the economy.
    - n2d4 3y ago
      "Savings and investments" counts as one category here.
- tivert 3y ago
  > Strictly economic theoretical speaking, inflation wouldn't happen if the money isn't "new" money, but instead is fully reallocated money. Wouldn't that be in aggregate? So maybe some inflation for food and deflation for luxury yachts.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    There probably would be while the market adjusts to the new demand levels and reallocates resources accordingly. But it would level itself out.
- dagw 3y ago
  Inflation is generally defined by the price increase of a basket of goods. If you relocate money from things outside that basket to things inside that basket then inflation can increase without the money pile getting bigger.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Inflation is gauged by a basket of goods, not defined by it. At heart, inflation is a mismatch between the real value of the economy and the currency placeholder used to represent that. This is why governments can (and need to) keep printing money as the economy grows.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  Money supply has little to do with inflation. You can print like crazy and have about 0 inflation (a decade before Covid) or you can raise rates and have huge inflation. It's because inflation happens when supply of goods is limited. Covid messed up the supply chain -> inflation happened. Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen. If you just print and just helicopter money you will have some inflation but this doesn't happen at scale significant enough to matter in any civilized country.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    >(a decade before Covid) You are aware that the increase in money supply from 2020 to 2022 is about the same as the increase from 2010 to 2020, despite ~45% lower GDP growth? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
    - paulmd 3y ago
      that’s actually OP’s point, which you missed - CPI change is different from money supply change. They are related and often move together but CPI can technically go up even if money supply goes down, if the demand for money increases.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
UBI experiments have been going on for decades. Pensions, annuities, trust funds, retirement savings. People spend it on living expenses. And a few amenities if there's anything left over. Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.

tiahura 3y ago

[flagged]

spiderfarmer 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwawa14223 3y ago
  Historically utopians have been far more dangerous.
  - spiderfarmer 3y ago
    There's a lot of leeway between advocating for gradual, realistic change and reaching for an impossible utopia.
    - throwawa14223 3y ago
      I would argue UBI is in the latter category.
      - spiderfarmer 3y ago
        So, let's hear some arguments instead of ad hominems.
        throwawa14223 3y ago
        Do you consider "utopian" an ad hominem, but not "danger to democracy?"
        spiderfarmer 3y ago
        It depends. Let's test this. Presume 80% of the country wants to increase taxes for the rich and corporations, tax churches, have Universal Healthcare and a Universal Basic Income, reform your educational system, legalise abortion, make sexual education mandatory, legalise dreamers, have easier immigration and they all vote for a party who has detailed plans on how to finance and realise those ideals. How do you react?

pton_xd 3y ago

The US handed out $1.8 trillion to individuals and families and $1.7 trillion to businesses during COVID. And then a few years later began experiencing the highest inflation rate in 40 years. And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on. I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.

aaomidi 3y ago
Correlation vs causation is a helluva drug
aurareturn 3y ago
It's mainly wealth distribution. The top percent owns too much while the bottom 80% owns too little. There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
- pton_xd 3y ago
  > There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same. Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Communism is indeed worse, but that doesn't automatically make our current system 'good'. Yes it's the best we tried so far, but it's not like we tried soo many others and this one ended up being the best out of all the ones tested. I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have. The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.

Gormo 3y ago

> UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs). The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance. This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.

lenerdenator 3y ago
The problem is, we already have that.
- laverya 3y ago
  One of many reasons that FDR was the worst president in US history.
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    I'm talking about the ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital. At least with federal programs there's _some_ ability for the average person to influence how the program is run, even if it's abstracted through Congress and elections. The alternative is neo-feudalism.
    - Gormo 3y ago
      I don't agree that there's any substantive difference in what you're complaining about and what you're proposing as a solution. The scenario in both cases is people being dependent for essential livelihood on organizations administered by strangers with their own motives. However, the status quo reality doesn't fully reflect what you're complaining about, because the "ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital" is something that is distributed widely across society, with a vast plurality of institutions and communities, having varying and often opposing motivations, all having the capacity to independently develop their own capital. Conversely, the political state is a single institution with structural incentives that converge toward a single set of objectives, and no, the electoral process is not a sufficient mechanism of accountability. Effectively, what you are arguing for is taking the pattern that you find unfavorable in the first place, and putting it under the control of a single centralized monopoly with insufficient safeguards against abuse.

bko 3y ago

Didn't we have an experiment with ubi during COVID. Everyone basically got a big check. You can see the huge impact it has on savings. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that but what I noticed it coincided with is a huge run up in asset prices (especially speculative things like crypto), and to eventually led to broad consumer inflation. Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/

mc32 3y ago

I believe many of these UBI experiments were also advocated by different billionaires. One idealistic group and one pessimistic group. Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense). For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

I'd say the biggest expected problem is massive inflation.

endominus 3y ago

As a critic of UBI, that's not what I expect at all. I expect all of these tests to have wonderful outcomes where people who get their share are able to make good choices, invest in their future, and become better off than their neighbors. I expect that this will always be the case for any test done with UBI, because I understand that these tests are modelling a situation fundamentally different from what would happen if the basic income granted were actually universal - publicly known and guaranteed by the government. In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation. What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning. True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why. Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't. Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely. [0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealth-mobility-is-low-and-decreases-with-age/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...

jackcviers3 3y ago

How does UBI avoid encouraging excessive inflation on basic goods? If there are more people to afford them, then surely demand will rise and supply will decrease, driving prices up until UBI must rise to compensate.

bluecalm 3y ago

Yeah and if you get a blowjob for free every morning your life is going to be better as well. The problem is someone needs to be forced to provide it. That's about how much those experiments are worth.

ceejayoz 3y ago
To extend the already really tortured analogy, we've got people who've managed to hoard many billions of... willing blowjob givers? And we've got people who... die from lack of blowjobs.
- bluecalm 3y ago
  I mean, even if you take all the billionaires money and somehow liquidate it in efficient way it will only be enough for basic income of 500$/month for about 30 months (in USA). It's not like you can turn Tesla into housing for the poor though with any kind of efficiency so even that scenario is very unlikely. If you want UBI long term you would need to heavily tax the middle class - people who work a lot and provide value every day. This is what always happens with such programs and happened in my country as well (where the UBI was very limited to 125$/month and only given per child). It's easy to point into "evil billionaires" and say to take for them but in reality you need to take a lot more from a guy who built his career for 15+ years and is now a doctor or a programmer or a small business owner. This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    "It's either the billionaires or the middle class" leaves out a pretty vast swath between 0.1M and 999M. > This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make. In theory, on paper, without any fiddles. In practice... nah. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lower-tax-rates-many-ordinary-americans/ https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lowe... "A study by White House economists released on September 23 found that the 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018."