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How would a BI work, give people $7k per year and save 3k for military and basic services? Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.
Out of curiosity don't we already do this? We have public/section 8 housing, food stamps, medical/dental, etc... If we are talking about handing out cold hard cash as basic income, as the statement implies, then that is a recipe for disaster. There would be no guarantee that people would use that money for basics like housing and food.
UBI is a thinly veiled attempt by elites to buy the consent of those of us who then can't just drug or satiate with cheap goods. I won't fall for it. Consume the rich!!
Doing some back of the envelope math, US gov revenue is 3.31 trillion and the population size is 323.1 million. Which leaves about $10244 per capita to play with. How would a BI work, give people $7k per year and save 3k for military and basic services? Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.
$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even upon receiving that, many people would still work massive hours to obtain the best house on the block.
But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. As you stated, that IS the entire budget.
Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That UBI stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.
How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare reform is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.
It feels like this statement is what would concern most skeptics of UBI, that is yet another layer of complexity on top of an already complex system.
Isn't the main benefit of UBI to make it so everything is streamlined into a single program and administrative overhead is reduced?
> America competitive in the world—lies in giving every citizen a regular allotment of money to cover basics like housing, food, and shelter. Out of curiosity don't we already do this? We have public/section 8 housing, food stamps, medical/dental, etc... If we are talking about handing out cold hard cash as basic income, as the statement implies, then that is a recipe for disaster. There would be no guarantee that pe…
Doing some back of the envelope math, US gov revenue is 3.31 trillion and the population size is 323.1 million. Which leaves about $10244 per capita to play with. How would a BI work, give people $7k per year and save 3k for military and basic services? Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.
"We’re still in our pilot. It turns out that giving money to people is much harder than you might imagine. We’ve had to work with state, local, federal governments so that people in our study don’t lose their housing eligibility, lose their food assistance just because we’re giving them money and raising their income level. And what we don’t want is to make anyone worse off." It feels like this statement is what woul…
Also it's not the main benefit of UBI. It's just one benefit (or side effect) of UBI - when it's universal (not just a pilot) you can reduce the overhead of administrative costs.
Doing some back of the envelope math, US gov revenue is 3.31 trillion and the population size is 323.1 million. Which leaves about $10244 per capita to play with. How would a BI work, give people $7k per year and save 3k for military and basic services? Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.
The math doesn't work and has never worked. UBI proponents will never talk math because it doesn't add up, even with the most casual analysis. $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. Even upon receiving that, many people woul…
I largely agree with what's being said in this interview, except for a few comments: > "But in countless ways it’s much harder to convince lawmakers and politicians to give every person in the country cash gratis than it is to guide a start-up to a nine-figure valuation." You don't have to convince lawmakers to do it. It's possible to implement basic income without any direct government support. > "The question I’m i…
How's that?
> The right question is "how do we unlock the economy's prosperity-maximizing capacity?"
Asked and answered: free-market capitalism. Nothing has resulted in the sort of rapid prosperity we've seen recently with market capitalism spreading globally.