81–90 of 389 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, tax the hell out of wealth. The math has never been the problem; it's always been taxing the wealthy that causes the conversation to die.
Honestly if you are going to give me free money + tax the hell out of me for working hard and going above and beyond I'll just relax and play video games and work on personal projects on my monthly stipend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
BI would get marginally smaller the more money you make. Not a steep cutoff like current services for poor, but it would probably be taxed as income so someone making 20'l,000 gets the full 7k, someone making 150k makes 3.5k.
Isn't the whole point of UBI that it isn't progressive, but rather universal ? Otherwise, it's essentially just another form of progressive income tax, where the bottom of the scale is a negative income tax. Right?
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.
> How would a BI work
By increasing revenue, for one thing.
> Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.
Yes, essentially no one, including BI proponents, disputes this.
Sam makes an interesting analogy with Y Combinator as providing a form of "basic income" to people trying to start startups. However, this analogy ignores a huge difference in the two cases: the people who are trying to start startups with Y Combinator's help are a highly self-selected group. Giving them "basic income" often turns out to be highly productive, yes. But that does not imply that giving basic income to e…
Also when a startup burns out their runway it dies and investors probably won't fund the same idea twice. What happens to the people who blow their UBI on drugs/gambling etc instead of healthcare and prosperity. Who will pay to re-fund them? (and fund them again?)
But who worries about this, or would consider cutting social security due to drinking or gambling?
Basically strive to enable Amish style living but instead of trying to maintain an complete early 19th way of life, include elements which are near free due to automated manufacturing.
You supply the land (lot in an exurban area near a major metro with a temperate climate) and labor and the rest is available at a minimal recurring cost. 1.) Housing - Permit ready Ikea like house with mail order pre-cut 2x4 and panels 2.) Energy - Solar charged battery/heating/cooling 3.) Transportation - 4 wheeled e-mountain bike 4.) Clothing - Target/Walmart 5.) Food - Self grown heirloom tomatoes, quinoa with store bought supplements such as cheap corn, meats, etc. 6.) Telecom - Long Range Wifi Receiver or Internet Cafe 7.) Education - Khan Academy, home schooling 8.) Entertainment - Youtube by DVD
The first two minutes of this video are pretty interesting/inspiring (not that I'm ready to drop everything to start a farm or anything...yet):
Urban Farmer Curtis Stone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHls2HEFudw
TLDR - Farming can teach you a lot about yourself.
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'm happy to discuss the math with you any day of the week. One of the biggest misconceptions that many people have is that the basic income (or any government funding) must somehow be funded through taxes.
That's not how money works.
There's a limit to the amount of government spending that the economy can productively absorb and that amount has very little, if anything to do with the amount of tax revenue that the government collects.
> 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.
If you try to do this using conventional budget math, you're not going to get the right answer.
> Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs
No. This is a terrible idea and it's due to the same misconception.
I agree with you that most basic income advocates don't understand the underlying economics. But the underlying economics are nevertheless sound.
> How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
Yup. Politically, it would be very difficult to accomplish. That's why we have to do it ourselves.
> I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
If you're interested in digging deeper on how this could work, I'm working on an economics paper that describes the economics of a basic income.
Here's an abstract: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KDLUTAOkduOXdNQWl3REw4eWc...
Email me if you're curious about reading the full thing.
> 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.
We've been undergoing this paradigm shift for centuries. It won't reach its full potential without a basic income to allow people to take full advantage of the wealth we're already capable of producing.
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'm no UBI expert, but I don't think you understand the point of UBI: universal basic income. I would argue (again no expert here) it's more about constant economic injection, providing a baseline to reduce risk of entrepreneurship and generally providing a higher quality of life to the 99%'ers.
As far as paying for it or finding the right way to make it happen in the US, I agree that there are a ton of roadblocks. Right now welfare is at $1.3 trillion, let's say that was increased to $2 trillion; divide by 300 million Americans and you've got over $6,500 per American per year. Just over half of what you stated is the typical amount discussed. That being said, I could certainly find a good use for an extra $500+ a month in income.
> How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I think it's the politicians and the news media that twists this, Americans in polls generally do support single-payer health care and I would posit this same sentiment would be shared for basic income (if not more support since it's quite a bit easier to understand)
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.
One possible mechanism is a social wealth fund that would gradually come to own (and distribute the proceeds from) a nontrivial portion of the national capital. Matt Bruenig wrote a NYTimes oped about this idea: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/opinion/inequality-social... with some suggestions for populating the fund: > Wouldn’t the enormous wealth that our increasingly productive society is generating, which now…
If I were Sam A. instead of (or in addition to) funding UBI, I would fund R&D projects which enable people to live as off grid and self-sufficiently as possible with all the comforts of urban/suburban living without all the costs. Basically strive to enable Amish style living but instead of trying to maintain an complete early 19th way of life, include elements which are near free due to automated manufacturing. You…
This would be a mistake. Self-sufficiency is very inefficient. By pooling our resources, we can live much more sustainably and prosperously.
If everybody in the world tried to live like the Amish, we'd destroy the planet in no time. That lifestyle was only sustainable when there were far fewer humans.
There's two issues that I don't think have been adequately addressed, or that I missed, in the banter over this issue. 1) What would stop us from recreating the inefficient welfare state that already exists on top of this new one when some people inevitably blow their UBI on drugs/cheetos/whatever and don't have money for rent? It seems that for this to work we'd have to maintain some intestinal fortitude to say "no"…
For issue (1), the articles I've seen suggest that the vast majority of people just don't do this. Certainly some do, but I don't see why a couple bad actors invalidate a scheme which can work for most of the population. I don't have an authoritative source on the above claims, but here's a 538 article which talks about the issue a bit. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do... "[reduction in ca…