Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/year_spending_2018UKbt_17...

Let's be generous and round it up to £250 billion, as some other savings might possibly be made in other areas.

The total government spending each year is £842 billion, and the cost of the UBI above (£1,000 a month) is £636 billion.

We're still about £380 billion short ... not far off half the current government budget.

Your point about cities is a good one, but I think this would actually increase the cost. It would be pretty difficult to live on £1,000 a month anywhere, but it would be impossible in some cities (definitely London!).

And while your point on revenue from other sources is valid, as VAT is about 20% here, I imagine the extra returns would be marginal.

Infact, when you consider reduced income taxes through some choosing to cut back on work/not-work, you might see these gains completely negated.

I'm not necessarily saying a UBI is a bad idea in and of itself, but it just seems impossible to implement a decent UBI due to budgetary constraints (it seems unfeasible to me).

You could feasibly pay out a UBI of something like £400 a month if you just replaced the current welfare budget with a UBI, but £400 a month isn't much, and this also ignores the fact that this would massively disadvantage people who were previously reliant on the welfare system for all of their income (perhaps due to inability to work).

I'm willing to concede UBI (or other unrestricted cash grants) could impact specific segments of a market. But, I can't find good evidence one way or the other that those negative pricing impacts offset increases in productivity, wellness, etc.

For instance, what would it take to devolve ownership of essential infrastructure for social reproduction (practically: hospitals, farms, housing, schools, etc) at the local level? How could we blend small forms of cooperative ownership into an economy that still has room for entrepreneurship? What's the right amount of state capacity to safeguard against disaster? IMO, these question of ownership were thoroughly excised from US political discourse for a mixture of reasons, some understandable (revulsion to Soviet totalitarianism) and some frustrating (lack of information because the conversation threatens entrenched power).

US political culture has an emphasis on personal liberty that I would never want to lose, but I'd love to see more Americans engage their capacity for invention toward resolving the tensions between individual freedom and collective wellbeing. In my opinion, Gar Alperovitz's work around the concept of a "Pluralist Commonwealth"[1] is a really interesting stab at this problem.

1. https://thenextsystem.org/principles-introduction

Why? What would be the reasoning?

I think you might want to pull the vocabulary back to conventional terms if you really want to discuss this productively.

With almost all of those, there are existing practical examples in the real world: the UK NHS covers hospitals, lots of US municipalities have experimented with public housing projects, public schooling is The Way It Is Done through most of the US already, one could argue that existing subsidy regimes all over the world constitute state "ownership" of farming, etc...

Frankly I don't think there's much mystery at all in what you're asking. Try picking a specific policy and arguing for that.