Evan Low introduced this bill. He is on the ballot right now, please vote accordingly
AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
61–70 of 207 posts
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#62I’d be a lot more interested if they’d fund it via property tax instead of VAT. Since California has such severe restrictions on housing construction, anything that puts more money in people pockets just gets absorbed by higher rent. The entire CA game is the fixed supply of housing eating up most of the economic output of individuals who aren’t grandfathered in. So if you’re going to fix it, collecting against the property owners who have spent decades greatly enriching themselves by making it prohibitively difficult for anyone new to move in would be a good start. Then when you go to try and remove the barriers to housing supply, they’d suddenly have a lot more reason to get on board (or at least get out of the way).
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#63I’m in favor of UBI, but it only works with floors on housing, healthcare, and possibly even food (which are more or less in place through ag subsidies anyway). All of this will just be eaten up by rents and rising healthcare costs, and means testing it makes it even more absurd, as it will exclude most vulnerable populations. Given the recent state-wide rent control, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a so…
Wouldn't it be easier to move away from the big cities and the big rents with ubi?
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#64Can they not do basic math? There are around 30 mil adults in California. Even if provision 18992.1 (b) is 5 mil people, that's still 25 mil people. That's 25 mil * $12,000 = $300 bil a year. The ENTIRE California state budget for 2020 is only $220 bil. They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes. Now, assuming the most generous interpretation of their 10% VAT proposal…
Boy, I already pay some of the highest taxes in the country and now I get to pay more. For what? They cannot manage anything else properly in this state.
See, you have to pay the share of all the property owners in the state paying decades-old property taxes too.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#65Can they not do basic math? There are around 30 mil adults in California. Even if provision 18992.1 (b) is 5 mil people, that's still 25 mil people. That's 25 mil * $12,000 = $300 bil a year. The ENTIRE California state budget for 2020 is only $220 bil. They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes. Now, assuming the most generous interpretation of their 10% VAT proposal…
Maybe its not the general population that will foot the bill. Also, if other state benefits were reduce, that would change the math.
It's easy to throw around FUD. But anything that redistributes wealth from the top 0.1% is the right direction.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For what? Schools. Roads. Sewers. Water. Clean air. Power. Safety. Just to name a few. Nothing important really.
WA has no income tax and their schools aren’t worse. Oregon has no sales tax and their schools aren’t worse. Are CA public schools by far the best in the nation? ( they are not) Edit: before you jump into the “other means funding” - I lived (and owned house) in WA and CA and the overall tax burden is MUCH higher in CA
What’s more is MA has many if the best public schools and Romneycare (at 3% uninsured, that’s the lowest amongst the 50 states) and its taxes aren’t higher than CA’s.
CA somehow manages to waste a lot of money. SF has city budgets higher than some states and still says it needs more money.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#67If you pass this without passing radical reform of zoning and building millions more homes, it will be yet another wealth transfer mechanism from poor consumers to wealthy California landholders. Rents will eventually match the increase in income as way too much demand chases an incredible, inhumane, History Will Judge You shortage of supply. Which, amazingly, is one of the reasons this could actually pass. Californi…
>an incredible, inhumane, History Will Judge You shortage of supply.
I'm starting to feel it's really just the massive demand. California cities are already quite dense. We can certainly do more but to say we're historically failing just doesn't make sense to me.
I'd love to see numbers on just how much pent up demand there is and how much building would need to take place before residents felt it but I realize its not an easy thing to estimate.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#68Can they not do basic math? There are around 30 mil adults in California. Even if provision 18992.1 (b) is 5 mil people, that's still 25 mil people. That's 25 mil * $12,000 = $300 bil a year. The ENTIRE California state budget for 2020 is only $220 bil. They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes. Now, assuming the most generous interpretation of their 10% VAT proposal…
If you double taxes, but the money is literally just going back into people's pockets, less administration fees of the UBI program, it's just income redistribution and can completely work.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#69The precautionary principle seems to be thrown to the wind here.
The unintended consequences of such a policy are far-reaching and poorly understood. UBI has seen a lot of coverage in the media recently and gets a lot of people excited on social media. Most coverage of it is shallow, but even the most in-depth studies of it that have been performed have been too small scale to have any bearing on the reality of transforming an entire state's economy.
It would be nice if we lived in a post-scarcity (or sufficiently close) economy where we could afford these things. I doubt we do.
Re: AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
#70Perhaps the authors of the bill are unaware that the U in UBI means Universal. If your unemployment benefits are less that UBI, you should get the difference in UBI, similarly excluding Medicaid recipients seems well, plain stupid.
It doesn't exclude medicaid, that's a federal program. These are the programs it excludes: > Medi-Cal program, the County Medical Services Program, the CalFresh program, the CalWORKs program, or Unemployment Insurance I'm not entirely sure why, though.
My read on the exclusions is that UBI as a form of welfare solves an issue all our other welfare programs have: attempting to apply credits to very specific costs instead of eliminating loads of administrative overhead and terrible paperwork by just giving people money to spend on what they actually need. cash instead of a giant coupon book which doesnt cover edgecases.
So I could understand if they want to try to replace existing welfare programs with UBI and then ratchet up the UBI amount until its better than the old programs (and more flexible).
But as-is, yeah, this doesnt help some of the ppl who need it most