Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

I want to see you attempt to do the math to show that.

Here's my rough math: Mean income is about $60k. If we take the extra simple option, we can increase all tax brackets by 20% and give everyone a $12k credit, and it trivially balances. The median income increases, the low end of income drastically increases, and higher incomes drop.

Such an outcome is very far from total socialization. The effective tax rate of anyone below $60k income drops, and the max marginal rate is a not-crazy 57%.

But also we can make the tax increase progressive as well. And we can include capital gains as income and lower the percents. And we can cut a good chunk of existing welfare which decreases the tax burden. This isn't a suggestion for an optimal method, it's a basic sanity check.

That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?

- UBI/Negative Income Tax (NIT) is not a handout to literally everyone, only the unemployed and lowest income folks will actually net money. Anyone with a modest income or larger will likely either see no changes to their net income or even a reduction in net income (due to higher taxes to pay for the program).

- Assuming a UBI of $1k (just making a number up, but it gets tossed around a lot), you would only get that full amount if you were unemployed, so that means you are pulling in $12k a year. Someone making $12k a year isn't really going to be renting an apartment by themselves. They are probably going to crash on a couch, live with relatives, or maybe rent a single room.

- As you go higher up the income ladder, the UBI phases out. I am also just making up numbers here, but maybe the phase out starts when you make $1k/month and stops at $3k/month. So someone making $12k a year in income would actually get $24k/year with UBI, but by the time you are making $36k/year you get $0 UBI. There are not a lot of areas in the country where you can rent apartments on these incomes. The places where you can do that, housing is probably not in as much demand and will likely not suffer from much if any inflation. So again, even if you are making a small income and bringing in some UBI, it will be designed to phase out long before someone could afford a one bedroom apartment in a high demand area.

- And I think a nice feature of this type of program, is UBI would actually help even out the demand imbalances between VHCOL and LCOL areas. No one living solely off UBI is going to be comfortable in SF or NYC. But there are a lot of regions in our country that have minimal job prospects and could desperately use some revitalization. UBI would go a lot farther in those areas and would create some monetary inflows back into those regions. That in turn could reduce some of the housing pressure on the VHCOL areas (although I am not sure it would be a huge effect).

It is worth mentioning that I assume most proponents of UBI are also acutely aware of the housing crises. To solve that, we need to build more housing. For the reasons listed above, I don't think UBI would cause much housing inflation, but even if it did, the solution to that problem is to build more housing, not to forgo welfare programs.

I can afford it because a healthy society is a productive society, and this will return to me because good economies are built largely upon productive societies, and healthy societies are more productive than unhealthy societies are.

Productivity generates wealth.

Are these not things that we generally understand to be true?

(Unless... Can it instead be shown that it is economically beneficial to have a relatively unhealthy and unproductive society?)

[Shall I make popcorn?]

(edit, can't reply further because of HN thread limits:

My dudes, "free" money from UBI isn't to keep people from working who want to get ahead. Most people can work, and most people do want a lot more than a shitty apartment in their life and are willing to work for that.

Y'all certainly want more than shitty apartment in your own lives, don't you? So why in the fuck would you ever assume that "dur, I have a shitty apartment and some simple food, so I don't have to do anything ever!" is the be-all, end-all human state?

Please re-align yourselves with the people you actually-know in life: I promise you that you'll see that almost none of them will give up on the rat-race if they start getting UBI. They'll generally want to keep making steps that seek to bring them ahead of their peers, and that means that they'll continue to do productive things. A thousand dollars per month (or whatever) isn't enough motivation for them to somehow cease being productive and stop working to get ahead.

There is no proposal for UBI that means the end of the fantastic American dream. UBI doesn't even mean the end of capitalism. UBI just creates a baseline financial safety net onto which anyone may fall without necessarily facing disease and death in the gutter, and it's there for everyone without even a shred of additional paperwork because it exists like clockwork without additional action on the part of the recipient, while also providing a bit of a boost for those at the low-end who do produce something that lets them get ahead of the game a little bit easier.)

It seems that more affluent are way more irresponsible with their money than poorer people.