A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

Most of the issue with support for Fair Tax is that it's enough of an overhaul that people believe it to be an unrealistic pipe dream, which is may well be.

One of the big perks of the Fair Tax is that it makes it easier for people to pay off debt and would actually encourage it. That gets a lot of support from many different angles.

No. Nowhere have I written "no money". You have written it a few times. I have stated that the money is balanced by a matching debt. You also keep mixing fractional reserve and central bank purchases. These are entirely different things.

And FOMC is also zero sum - the dollars they inject are backed by debts they hold.

>look up Money creation by the commercial banks in the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation

Yes, I am quite aware of this, even having been involved in many discussions and papers on exogenous vs endogenous money. If you want to really blow your mind search those terms and read academic papers on them.

What you seem to not understand is that the money is offset by matching debt. Your link states this in the first paragraph: "A central bank may introduce new money into the economy (termed "expansionary monetary policy", or "money printing" by detractors) by purchasing financial assets or lending money to financial institutions"

The Fed traditionally purchases debt to put more current into play. As more dollars are in the economy, the Fed carries more debt, the same as any bank when it loans out deposits. The difference is the Fed can purchase as much as it wants, but the sum is still zero.

Look: the fed has a balance sheet. Here are many snapshots of it [1]. It sums to zero. Take the last one from March, 2016 [2]. Look at page 6, Table 1. There is a line titled "Federal Reserve Notes in circulation". It is 1385B. There are other assets and debts. They are summed. The sum is zero.

Next - this has zero to do with fractional reserve, since you could have either without the other. We (and most of the world) had fractional reserve before we had a central bank.

So yes, there is more money. There is also matching debt. This is what I have stated since the beginning. You don't seem willing to note that the debt matches the money in every case, whether it's Joe loaning Bob, it's a bank and fractional reserve, or it's a central bank purchasing assets. The central bank has unlimited reserves, is the issuer of currency, and can take on unlimited debt.

If it helps you think clearly, assume the central bank has 20 quadrillion dollars. They decide to add X dollars to the economy, so they buy X in assets. Now they have 20Q - X in cash, X in assets, we have -X in assets, X in cash.

Where the economy increases is when the people buy goods (say Treasuries), and their value in dollars goes up through market pricing, then they get sold to the Fed. The Fed didn't add the value, market pricing did. The Fed simply traded some of it's (unlimited) reserves for assets.

This is also why the Fed traditionally purchases at open market prices - it helps them match inflation since the market, not the Fed, decides prices.

So - are you still claiming all these stages are not zero sum? If so, please detail which step is not zero sum.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/quarterly-bala...

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/quarterl...

Then, when you realize that toll roads are correlated with population density, perhaps you could realize that toll roads are then only also correlated with politics of state, not caused by them.

For example: If liberals loved toll roads, then California, Oregon and Washington would be full of them. But only the NorthEast is, right?

So your hypothesis falls apart here anyway.

Yes, they should. This is the way it is right now. That's how unemployment insurance works: you pay into it as you work, and then draw from it when you're unemployed. (Of course, a lot of people don't bother because it's a huge hassle, but that's beside the point.)

Do you also think that someone who has full insurance on their $90,000 Mercedes shouldn't get a full payout when someone crashes into it?

I do think that unemployment insurance (since it's a government program and not optional) should be phased out under UBI. But "phased out" is the key phrase here, just as with SSI.

>- Likewise, many hardworking people take a roommate to save money.

>Should they have to pay for other people to live more extravagantly? There is nothing unhealthy or unsafe (in general) about sleeping in the same room with another person, or turning a room that fits 2 people into two smaller rooms.

This is illegal. Most municipalities have codes which prevent more people from living in a place than a certain number, based on the bedrooms (usually 1 per bedroom, except with kids). And yes, I think asking people to have roommates (in the same bedroom) is going too far. Housing is this country is cheap: it's cheaply constructed, with cheap materials, and land is plentiful outside of downtown metro areas. There is absolutely no reason for rents to be as high as they are. Instead of trying to force people into unsafe living situations with strangers, the government needs to fix the housing problem. They're not going to do that as long as people like Hillary are in bed with Wall Street and allow speculation on residential real estate.

>I think in an average cost-of-living town in the US, you need 300 to 350 to rent a room (all to yourself!), 250 for groceries, soap, razor blades, etc. That leaves 100 or 150 to get around. Certainly not enough for a car or taxi rides.

This is what I'm proposing. If that's enough for someone to get by in an average location in the US, that's what the UBI should be set at. And $150/month for a car is actually doable: you can get a pretty decent used car for $5k, and if you're mechanically handy (buy tools at Harbor Freight) you can maintain it yourself for next to nothing, and then as long as your commute is short, and with liability-only insurance, the monthly cost for your transportation should be in that range, even better once you get the vehicle paid off (which you can do by doing some extra work for more money, then after it's paid off you can relax and not work as much or at all). But really, affording a car shouldn't even necessarily be part of it (though as I pointed out, if you're frugal and able to do your own maintenance, it's not that expensive; insurance might blow the budget though). There is public transit in places (though it mostly sucks and needs serious revamping; see SkyTran), and people at the minimum could just get by with a bicycle.

The whole point of UBI is so people can get by and not have major financial stress; it literally kills people, by shortening their lifespans. Sticking them in a room with some stranger and not allowing them any privacy at all is not the answer. So the UBI should be set so that they can afford to rent a room (the whole room), buy groceries, and have a little extra (maybe riding a bicycle) so they don't feel completely miserable, and then can go seek employment as they wish for more money.

I do think unemployment insurance and SSI should both be phased out, and maybe unemployment insurance can be a private matter instead, and I also think universal healthcare needs to be instituted. I also think the UBI should be the same for everyone; it's too complicated otherwise, and I don't think people who want to live in Manhattan or other high-rent areas should be given that luxury and funded by the rest of us (otherwise, we'll all move to high-rent locations). People living in high-rent places like that now with government benefits will have to move under UBI; too bad. If $700/month is enough to make all this work, then great, let's set it at $700/month.