Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

1. It's important to remember that having struggling poor people is expensive for the system. Emergency shelters, health issues that go untreated until they need emergency intervention, desperation crimes like theft (affecting policing and prisons), foster care, drug use intervention. These are all expenses that are reduced by a system like UBI. If you keep people healthy and fed, you can keep them peaceful and working and the program pays for itself.

2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.

> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing

"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.

>If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens

It's a double stretch to say that (1) the "rich" are the "most productive" members of society, and (2) that imposing progressive taxation on them somehow harms the economy.

How do short lived and small stimulus checks even remotely resemble UBI?

UBI essentially occurs for everyone in the United States at age 67. It is called Social Security. "Works" has not been defined in this article, and I'm not sure by reading it I understand what that means. If it were implemented for the population at large, this would drive commodities, and housing prices up. Also, with no limits on its use, drug use would most likely increase, as would crime. This would also incentivize further immigration problems. As other programs with good intentions, this would quickly spiral out of control. Approximately $1.7 trillion dollars of our deficit is spent on Medicare/Medicaid.

That is more than a third of the total revenue of the United States. I do not see how UBI or GBI would benefit anyone other than those unwilling to work.

There are two books I would recommend people read. The first is Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change by Martin Wolf, and the second The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Bowles. Both go into detail the problems we are facing. The first book was a text book one of my kids had for their economics course. I decided to read it out of curiosity. It changed my view on several key issues.

Futhermore, the UBI experiment in Finland failed. Every notable economist agreed, Finland's own report showed it was a failure. They noted not only the economic failure, but also the social failure, with their populous overwhelmingly feeling there was an unfairness in the system.

Let me tell you how Medicaid/Medicare is being abused. You might find I'm cruel, or I don't love my mother. But here are the facts. My mother went on Medicare in 2007. She had two different cancers. Medicare picked up the tab up for both. Treatment for each one was well over $1 million dollars. She then had both knees replaced, both hips replaced for a total of almost $450,000.

Then COVID came. She refused to get vaccinated. She was placed in ICU for 60 days on a ventilator. Furthermore, she had a heart attack, and her stomach ruptured while on the ventilator. How she survived is beyond me. The total bill picked up by medicare was well over a million. She viewed it as her right. She is a Woodstock hippie, everything had to be natural, and kept those beliefs until she was old enough to get on Medicare.

I don't think we understand what we're doing when we allow this kind of gross spending and how it works in our political system. For me, if I require millions of dollars to keep me alive, let me die. I don't want those costs passed onto my children and the next generation. If I'm so poor I need UBI, I would hope, I would do something not to cause others to be inconvenienced and work.

Be careful of the government programs you want. The people you think won't abuse them, will absolutely abuse them. I feel UBI would be disastrous, but would be abused and further corruption in our country.

> A huge slice of our political landscape is people who still think trickle down economics works, tons of politicians are elected running on platforms for tax cuts. Reagan's politics live on and are largely responsible for how shit the world has become over the last 4 decades or so.

The problem here is the need to distinguish between two things that are complicated to distinguish.

There are a lot of regulations on the books with a decent cost/benefit ratio, and a lot with a poor cost/benefit ratio. Everyone benefits from removing the latter, but there are thousands of individual rules and you need someone who understands them to distinguish one type from the other. But these are often the exact people (lawyers, compliance bureaucrats) who benefit from the status quo and don't want wasteful inefficiencies to be removed because it pays their salary.

Meanwhile voters don't have the bandwidth to dive into the details, so in politics the candidates who want to do the right thing just say "we need fewer regulations" -- okay great, let's vote for that guy? But there is another class of candidate who is captured by corporations and says the same words but the regulations they want to get rid of are the ones with a high cost/benefit ratio, only the cost is on the corporation and the benefit is to the public.

You have to find a way to distinguish between them or you're screwed. Just saying "leave the inefficient rules in place and keep accumulating more of them forever" is still you're screwed, you have to actually solve that problem.

> Then close them.

That's what they did at the same time as they lowered the rate. Government revenues aren't any lower now than they were then -- they're higher.

> I don't care.

You don't care that it won't actually generate any long-term revenue? Then what is its purpose, just pure animosity?

> Yes, and I am suggesting the tax be based on net worth, not income.

Which is completely asinine because it creates all kinds of perverse incentives.

Major corporations would end up being controlled by foreign nationals instead of domestic ones because domestic owners would have to sell their shares to pay the tax. Anyone subject to the tax would have the incentive to take insanely wasteful high risk bets because high rates of return would be the only way to cover the tax without losing money year over year and losing everything to the tax over ten years isn't much worse than losing everything in a casino right away. Some assets would be harder to value than others and then trillions of dollars would shift into those assets away from others, which would be several different kinds of disastrous.

There are reasons we don't do it that way.

> frankly, I don't really give a shit about the economy either. We hear all about how great the economy is doing year over year, and me and my friends get more and more broke as it does. If the economy's doing great, it's not doing great for me or anyone I care about, and insofar as that's the case, why the fuck should I care if it continues to do great?

People say it's doing great because they have the incentive to find numbers that allow them to make themselves look good. They'll always say that when they're in charge. In fact there are some problems right now, but don't think for a second that adopting poorly considered policies couldn't make it a lot worse.