Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

Yang's proposal doesn't seem like UBI to me. A key component of UBI being the U - i.e that it is universal. However, Yang wants to pay for it, in part, by adding new taxes. In order for some people to make money, others must, on net, lose money.

To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not.

Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.

Yang wants to give everyone legal ownership of their own data. That is going to be more disruptive to the tech industry than antitrust rulings against a few companies.

Right, I think this is the most underrated consequence of UBI.

I think another is the creative boom it could create. People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success. That could create a whole new class of artists that couldn’t be possible otherwise.

Payroll taxes are for the most part paid by the employer on behalf of the employee. That's not Amazon's tax bill. Amazon's tax bill is what they would pay over their profits at year end and they do what they can to pay nothing at all, like almost all other multi-nationals.

"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort of say billionaires are inherently evil,” he said. “I think it would be great to say, we as a society will allow trillionaires in exchange for a floor for everyone.”"

The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.

UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing.

Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration.

Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.