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Warning: back of the envelope calculations ahead You're forgetting the fact that a basic income would obviate all means-based welfare programs, unemployment i

Warning: back of the envelope calculations ahead You're forgetting the fact that a basic income would obviate all means-based welfare programs, unemployment insurance, social security, etc; this means 2.3 TRILLION dollars (1.03T from means-based welfare programs and 1.3T from SS) in savings. Also, it would be enormously strange if we gave a full basic income to every infant, toddler, child and teen in the United States. It seems pretty obvious that kids would count as an adjustment to your received basic income that's <100% of an entire additional basic income. For comparison, a single-person household on average gets $200/mo in food stamps and a family of four gets $500/mo, which works out to children costing 1/4th as much as an adult (and note that food stamps are more sensitive to additional children than housing costs are). The percentage of the population that's below 18 is somewhere around ~25%, so depending on the multiplier that takes ~$600B off of the cost. This means that the actual incremental cost of the program would be roughly $200B(with the weak-link assumption here being the multiplier of a child's cost). This is obviously a large sum of money, but considering the scope of such a program, a revenue increase of that magnitude would honestly be relatively trivial. This is particularly the case when you realize that if you raise tax rates just enough to cancel out the basic income for, say, upper-middle class or higher, you end up with no net tax increase for anyone and an additional bump in revenue (equivalent to a reduction in cost from limiting the basic income to everyone below a given income level, without the administrative hassle of means-testing). I'm not saying the math WILL definitely work out, because I don't know what the basic-income figure would actually be (especially given C-o-L differences), but there's enough extreme inaccuracies in the bound you're giving that it's not really useful.

harryh 13y ago
Social Security pays the retired 10s of Ks per year so they can live comfortably after paying into the system for their entire career. You think we should get rid of that in favor of a basic income of ~10k for everyone? That's going to suck pretty bad for the retired. You're certainly entitled to your opinion if you do think that but the vast vast vast majority of Americans are going to disagree with you.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  Do you have a source for that? According to the social security administration, the average monthly payout is about 1100/mo. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/ http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/ Even if social security was completely removed for a basic income of 10k (I'll clarify again that I'm not endorsing that figure as a blanket basic income), it would be a cut of a couple thousand a year, not a cut of more than 10k as you claim. Hell you could even keep all the net SS+basic income payouts the same and social security costs would drop to 1/5th of what they are now, saving over a trillion dollars. Also, That was like, one third of one fourth of my post. The fact that your estimate was way way off (far from "simple math") is barely changed by excluding social security.
  - dantheman 13y ago
    In addition to SS there is medicare which costs a fortune and many other programs such ones that fund community centers, affordable housing, etc.
  - harryh 13y ago
    > That was like, one third of one fourth of my post. The importance of different pieces of your post shouldn't be measured in word count, but in dollars. I picked the part that matters the most (by far) from this perspective.
    - wutbrodo 13y ago
      Sure, my phrasing seemed to minimize the importance of SS in terms of dollar amt, but the fact remains that even with the most dramatic cut possible to SS (i.e. "completely replace it"), the SS cuts amount to less than half of the savings in costs (i.e. the error in your simple math claiming to show why it's mathematically impossible). Once you include the revenue increase I mentioned (the one that works out to a tax burden that's no higher for anyone because it just cancels out the basic income for certain income tax tiers), SS cuts become even further below 50% of the cost-savings I mentioned. I'll assume that you don't actually disagree with my original comment from the fact that you're resorting to picking successively more microscopic nits.

harryh 13y ago

Social Security pays the retired 10s of Ks per year so they can live comfortably after paying into the system for their entire career. You think we should get rid of that in favor of a basic income of ~10k for everyone? That's going to suck pretty bad for the retired. You're certainly entitled to your opinion if you do think that but the vast vast vast majority of Americans are going to disagree with you.

wutbrodo 13y ago
Do you have a source for that? According to the social security administration, the average monthly payout is about 1100/mo. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/ http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/ Even if social security was completely removed for a basic income of 10k (I'll clarify again that I'm not endorsing that figure as a blanket basic income), it would be a cut of a couple thousand a year, not a cut of more than 10k as you claim. Hell you could even keep all the net SS+basic income payouts the same and social security costs would drop to 1/5th of what they are now, saving over a trillion dollars. Also, That was like, one third of one fourth of my post. The fact that your estimate was way way off (far from "simple math") is barely changed by excluding social security.
- dantheman 13y ago
  In addition to SS there is medicare which costs a fortune and many other programs such ones that fund community centers, affordable housing, etc.
- harryh 13y ago
  > That was like, one third of one fourth of my post. The importance of different pieces of your post shouldn't be measured in word count, but in dollars. I picked the part that matters the most (by far) from this perspective.
  - wutbrodo 13y ago
    Sure, my phrasing seemed to minimize the importance of SS in terms of dollar amt, but the fact remains that even with the most dramatic cut possible to SS (i.e. "completely replace it"), the SS cuts amount to less than half of the savings in costs (i.e. the error in your simple math claiming to show why it's mathematically impossible). Once you include the revenue increase I mentioned (the one that works out to a tax burden that's no higher for anyone because it just cancels out the basic income for certain income tax tiers), SS cuts become even further below 50% of the cost-savings I mentioned. I'll assume that you don't actually disagree with my original comment from the fact that you're resorting to picking successively more microscopic nits.