For example, back of the envelope, there are 210M 18+ adults in this country and 120M children. Let's say we give adults $1,000/month plus another $500/month for each child they have. That's 12 x [(210Mx1000)+(120mx500)] = $3.24 Trillion.
For scale, current income tax revenue is $2.4T. So we would need to increase income taxes 150% if we didn't cut other programs. Or total federal tax revenue (including social security, corporate profit, etc) is $4.4T. So we would need to increase that by about 74% if we didn't cut other programs. All of this puts us probably into the "not feasible" range, unless we are making strong assumptions about people not being affected by incentives.
So that means we either have to make the benefit much smaller or cut other programs. The biggest one is Social Security. After that, Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare. Then the military. If you are willing to contemplate cuts there, we might be able to put something together.
Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
I’ve always thought UBI sounds like an elegant approach to one day replace our safety net, such as it is. It caught my attention when Milton Friedman advocated for it in Capitalism and Freedom (1962). I think there are two main problems with it:
1. How high should the benefit be and who all gets it? The cost becomes very large quickly.
2. How high must the tax rate be to support it? I think the disincentive to work under a UBI comes much more from the implied high marginal tax rate than the lump sum benefit.
In short, neat idea but I think we aren’t rich and productive enough yet where UBI could replace our current means-tested programs.
1. You can set the benefit wherever you feel comfortable, but I personally think in the $20-30k USD per person is the range we need to target. As to who all gets it, everyone. Otherwise it's not really universal. And yes, the cost becomes large very quickly, because we're talking about the entire population of the US. If we look at the lower end, we're looking at roughly $20,000 * ~330,000,000 people = 20k * 330M = 20 * 330B = 6.6T = $6,600,000,000,000, or $6.6 trillion USD. The US GDP is ~$21 trillion, so we'd only need to use about a third of our productivity to ensure a good standard living for all.
Note: "~" means "about"
2. That's a great question with a very complicated answer. First off, you have to consider that productivity became divorced from real wage growth around 1970:
What this means is that while wages have remained relatively flat since 1970, going from ~1.75 to a 2.1 today, productivity went from 1.75 to 3.5. Almost all of this increased productivity is currently going to the uber rich, which is why wages have stagnated. If we were paid our fair share, their numbers couldn't go up.
In 1964, the rich started to gain capture of the government and the maximum tax was lowered from 90% to 70%. Today's taxes are much much lower with a cap of 37%, and capital gains taxes are likewise much lower. So we know the rich can bear the higher rates.
Now let's look at the budget. For 2022, it's slightly over $6.0T, with 65% allocated to mandatory spending programs, which are all of our social security programs. So slightly less than $4.0T is already allocated towards social programs, we would only have to raise taxes (or eat a deficit hit) to raise the remaining $2.6T. If we assume the entire budget is paid for by taxes (it's not) then that would mean that of our $21T GDP, only $6T is is used by the government. So there's up to $15T more that could be tapped. We would go from a total effective tax of (6T)/(21T) = 28.6% to (6T+2.6T)/(21T) = 41.0%. With the previously shown productivity gap, all of the additional taxation needed could be paid for just by taxing the rich.
So I think it's a very affordable program. And keep in mind that if you kept in means testing, having the UBI benefits drop off as your personal income increases, you can reduce the $6.6T number pretty significantly.
One criticism of UBI that I see a lot is that corporations and landlords will just raise prices. Am I right in thinking that the way to combat this is to tax the everliving fuck out of stolen wealth so that corporations and parasites couldn't actually gain anything by price gouging?
Macroeconomics makes very little sense to me; I'm just a worker bee who's very angry about the status quo.
edit: it's 2022; how come autocorrect keeps changing things to be grammatically wrong
Living on a UBI is living on a fixed income, you'd only get $20k per year. Greedy corporations and landlords that raise prices would be doing so on a very price sensitive population, and would likely just price themselves out of the market. And the UBI won't happen in a vacuum, other regulations would also have to be passed to protect UBI recipients from the worst part of corporate capitalism. I can easily see the government, as a representative of the people, negotiating with apartment complex owners and the like to fix rents at an affordable rate. We already have programs right now that will help pay for construction of multi-unit housing in exchange for fixed rates and guaranteed rental unit allocations.
A functioning government representing the interests of the people is a necessary counterbalance to the excesses of unfettered capitalism.
Heffling you're doing a couple of mutually exclusively things there. Mainly this:
I personally think in the $20-30k USD per person is the range we need to target. As to who all gets it, everyone. Otherwise it's not really universal.
is not compatible with doing this:
For 2022, it's slightly over $6.0T, with 65% allocated to mandatory spending programs, which are all of our social security programs. So slightly less than $4.0T is already allocated towards social programs, we would only have to raise taxes (or eat a deficit hit) to raise the remaining $2.6T.
The social programs aren't a universal cash thing like UBI. Deducting them and giving out a UBI that's 40% the size of what you wanted doesn't equally out to doing a full UBI. 12k cash + social security /medicare you won't be eligible for for 40 years and can't use if you don't earn non-UBI income isn't the same thing as 30k cash.
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
The natural pressure is that of a desire to survive, not just freezing/starving to death. The artificial pressure is the inducement by fellow man that your survival is tied to your productivity. The hunter/gatherer tribe you're referring too didn't have quotas for number of spears to produce in a day.
Growth isn't unfettered, but there is a huge amount of room to grow, especially on the global scale. Better automation, developing electrical grids based on renewable resources from the ground up, etc. Developing nations have massive room to grow.
Part of getting to the endgame of a utopia is replacing human labor with automated labor, e.g. increasing automation. This will free up humanity to pursue whatever we decide we want to pursue, because we will no longer have to work. This can and should happen across the globe, and not just in one nation.
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
Heffling you're doing a couple of mutually exclusively things there. Mainly this:
I personally think in the $20-30k USD per person is the range we need to target. As to who all gets it, everyone. Otherwise it's not really universal.
is not compatible with doing this:
For 2022, it's slightly over $6.0T, with 65% allocated to mandatory spending programs, which are all of our social security programs. So slightly less than $4.0T is already allocated towards social programs, we would only have to raise taxes (or eat a deficit hit) to raise the remaining $2.6T.
The social programs aren't a universal cash thing like UBI. Deducting them and giving out a UBI that's 40% the size of what you wanted doesn't equally out to doing a full UBI. 12k cash + social security /medicare you won't be eligible for for 40 years and can't use if you don't earn non-UBI income isn't the same thing as 30k cash.
I'm not following?
Current Total Budget = $6T
Current % of Budget Spent on Social Programs = 65%
Current $ of Budget Spent on Social Programs = 65% * $6T =~$4T
Target needed for UBI = $6.6T
Gap between UBI and Social Programs = $6.6T - $4.0T = $2.6T
So we'd need to raise the budget from $6T to $8.6T and reallocate all social spending to the UBI to pay for the UBI.
Oh wait, I see the problem. Don't think of this as the initial form for UBI, think of this as the final form. The initial form would be implement a UBI with a cost of $2.6T, paid for in taxes, which would give everyone a UBI of ~$7,900 initially. Then as we see which social programs need less support or utilization, we could move their funding into the UBI pool and close out those programs. For example, a UBI should be able to completely replace social security.
And if we determine that some social security programs are too valuable to give up, then we keep those and increase taxes or deficit or etc etc to pay for the difference.
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
You can craft another hypothetical if you want, the point is that giving everyone $X and calling that good will result in some folks who wind up in situations where they need more than $X. Maybe due to blind misfortune, maybe due to past mistakes, whatever.
At that point, you either leave them to die in the streets, or you implement a social safety net. I assume the people talking about UBI are probably not of the "let them die in the streets" mindset, hence the need to figure out how a revised social safety net fits into this.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
You can craft another hypothetical if you want, the point is that giving everyone $X and calling that good will result in some folks who wind up in situations where they need more than $X. Maybe due to blind misfortune, maybe due to past mistakes, whatever.
At that point, you either leave them to die in the streets, or you implement a social safety net. I assume the people talking about UBI are probably not of the "let them die in the streets" mindset, hence the need to figure out how a revised social safety net fits into this.
Doesn't UBI substantially change this calculation though? Labor isn't mobile partly because we don't have UBI. You can't simply chase a lower cost of living, because you'll be giving up support systems which are otherwise making things somewhat tenable. But under a regime with UBI, people can be much more mobile because the usual sticking elements - i.e. whatever job you have pins you to your current location - are much less so.
For example, back of the envelope, there are 210M 18+ adults in this country and 120M children. Let's say we give adults $1,000/month plus another $500/month for each child they have. That's 12 x [(210Mx1000)+(120mx500)] = $3.24 Trillion.
For scale, current income tax revenue is $2.4T. So we would need to increase income taxes 150% if we didn't cut other programs. Or total federal tax revenue (including social security, corporate profit, etc) is $4.4T. So we would need to increase that by about 74% if we didn't cut other programs. All of this puts us probably into the "not feasible" range, unless we are making strong assumptions about people not being affected by incentives.
So that means we either have to make the benefit much smaller or cut other programs. The biggest one is Social Security. After that, Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare. Then the military. If you are willing to contemplate cuts there, we might be able to put something together.
Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
Assuming we are talking about my $1K/.5K/month baseline, I understand your proposal is to partially fund this by increasing the marginal tax rate of any post-UBI earnings up to 2xUBI post-UBI by 50 points.
So for a single individual for example, you’d want to add 50 percentage points to their marginal tax rate from the $12K to $36K bracket. Or for a family with three kids, we’re adding 50 points to their marginal tax rate from $42k to $124K.
If we take those 50 points, add maybe 12-22 points of existing marginal income tax rate, another 7-8 points of FICA, a couple points more for state and maybe local taxes; I think we might just fall off the Laffer Curve!
For example, back of the envelope, there are 210M 18+ adults in this country and 120M children. Let's say we give adults $1,000/month plus another $500/month for each child they have. That's 12 x [(210Mx1000)+(120mx500)] = $3.24 Trillion.
For scale, current income tax revenue is $2.4T. So we would need to increase income taxes 150% if we didn't cut other programs. Or total federal tax revenue (including social security, corporate profit, etc) is $4.4T. So we would need to increase that by about 74% if we didn't cut other programs. All of this puts us probably into the "not feasible" range, unless we are making strong assumptions about people not being affected by incentives.
So that means we either have to make the benefit much smaller or cut other programs. The biggest one is Social Security. After that, Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare. Then the military. If you are willing to contemplate cuts there, we might be able to put something together.
Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
Assuming we are talking about my $1K/.5K/month baseline, I understand your proposal is to partially fund this by increasing the marginal tax rate of any post-UBI earnings up to 2xUBI post-UBI by 50 points.
So for a single individual for example, you’d want to add 50 percentage points to their marginal tax rate from the $12K to $36K bracket. Or for a family with three kids, we’re adding 50 points to their marginal tax rate from $42k to $124K.
If we take those 50 points, add maybe 12-22 points of existing marginal income tax rate, another 7-8 points of FICA, a couple points more for state and maybe local taxes; I think we might just fall off the Laffer Curve!
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
You can craft another hypothetical if you want, the point is that giving everyone $X and calling that good will result in some folks who wind up in situations where they need more than $X. Maybe due to blind misfortune, maybe due to past mistakes, whatever.
At that point, you either leave them to die in the streets, or you implement a social safety net. I assume the people talking about UBI are probably not of the "let them die in the streets" mindset, hence the need to figure out how a revised social safety net fits into this.
Doesn't UBI substantially change this calculation though? Labor isn't mobile partly because we don't have UBI. You can't simply chase a lower cost of living, because you'll be giving up support systems which are otherwise making things somewhat tenable. But under a regime with UBI, people can be much more mobile because the usual sticking elements - i.e. whatever job you have pins you to your current location - are much less so.
It changes the numbers. It doesn't change the fact that the numbers exist.
Even with a social safety net, people fall through the cracks. Having no net at all and relying on a perfectly calibrated UBI system is just a recipe for disaster.
Maybe instead of a SNAP program that gets food to 10 million families you only need a SNAP program that serves 1 million families. Or 100,000 families. That's still 100,000 families we'd prefer didn't just starve to death, and not every family has a support system waiting on the wings, even if you assume infinite mobility.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
You can craft another hypothetical if you want, the point is that giving everyone $X and calling that good will result in some folks who wind up in situations where they need more than $X. Maybe due to blind misfortune, maybe due to past mistakes, whatever.
At that point, you either leave them to die in the streets, or you implement a social safety net. I assume the people talking about UBI are probably not of the "let them die in the streets" mindset, hence the need to figure out how a revised social safety net fits into this.
Doesn't UBI substantially change this calculation though? Labor isn't mobile partly because we don't have UBI. You can't simply chase a lower cost of living, because you'll be giving up support systems which are otherwise making things somewhat tenable. But under a regime with UBI, people can be much more mobile because the usual sticking elements - i.e. whatever job you have pins you to your current location - are much less so.
It changes the numbers. It doesn't change the fact that the numbers exist.
Even with a social safety net, people fall through the cracks. Having no net at all and relying on a perfectly calibrated UBI system is just a recipe for disaster.
Maybe instead of a SNAP program that gets food to 10 million families you only need a SNAP program that serves 1 million families. Or 100,000 families. That's still 100,000 families we'd prefer didn't just starve to death, and not every family has a support system waiting on the wings, even if you assume infinite mobility.
and Medicaid covers medical treatment no UBI will ever pay for.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Many Anti UBI arguments seem to assume firstly that removing the threat of starvation and death would result in people simply ceasing to work, and that we need as many people working now to continue working or society would fall apart. I feel these are both innacurate beliefs. The country is chock full of people who could stop working and never work again a day in their lives, and yet they don't. On top or the fact that many people like to feel useful and like to work as a general thing, I think it's been well evidenced by this point that in most human psychology enough is never enough. This is often a curse, but the positive side is many people would continue working to be able to afford luxuries and a higher standard of living, even if they aren't going to die if they don't. And of the small number of people who do simply drop out of the labor force as we know it, many will likely do so to pursue their passions which are not currently economically rewarded or self sustaining, but are still contributing Culturally and materially to society, just not necessarily in ways currently arbitrarily favored by the current capital framework. And it's not like none of them will try to sell their work themselves, it's just less all or nothing if they don't always succeed.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
For example, back of the envelope, there are 210M 18+ adults in this country and 120M children. Let's say we give adults $1,000/month plus another $500/month for each child they have. That's 12 x [(210Mx1000)+(120mx500)] = $3.24 Trillion.
For scale, current income tax revenue is $2.4T. So we would need to increase income taxes 150% if we didn't cut other programs. Or total federal tax revenue (including social security, corporate profit, etc) is $4.4T. So we would need to increase that by about 74% if we didn't cut other programs. All of this puts us probably into the "not feasible" range, unless we are making strong assumptions about people not being affected by incentives.
So that means we either have to make the benefit much smaller or cut other programs. The biggest one is Social Security. After that, Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare. Then the military. If you are willing to contemplate cuts there, we might be able to put something together.
Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
Assuming we are talking about my $1K/.5K/month baseline, I understand your proposal is to partially fund this by increasing the marginal tax rate of any post-UBI earnings up to 2xUBI post-UBI by 50 points.
So for a single individual for example, you’d want to add 50 percentage points to their marginal tax rate from the $12K to $36K bracket. Or for a family with three kids, we’re adding 50 points to their marginal tax rate from $42k to $124K.
If we take those 50 points, add maybe 12-22 points of existing marginal income tax rate, another 7-8 points of FICA, a couple points more for state and maybe local taxes; I think we might just fall off the Laffer Curve!
What?
It's basically a restatement of Quid's proposal that UBI would be lowered by $1 for every $2 of income. So you get the full $12k/year benefit up front, but with an extra 50% income tax up to $24k, at which point the extra tax and UBI balances out. There might be a subtle difference here in when benefits are paid vs taxes, but the long term amount of benefits are the same.
As I said before, I think UBI is elegant but we’re not yet rich enough to use it as a replacement for the social safety net. But that isn’t apparent when just talking about generalities. We need to write down basic numbers.
Let me also restate that I don’t think the biggest work disincentive would be the UBI payment, as was mentioned people like to have more, but rather the huge implied marginal tax rates if we do aggressive phase outs (such as 2:1) and/or use income taxes to finance.
Let me put my chips on the table. I think we can fund a small amount of basic income (not yet enough to live on) right now, and we can pull it off if we fund it through consumption rather than income taxes to minimize the work incentive effects.
I think a good first step is looking at carbon tax and dividend programs. Two countries and half a dozen Canadian territories/provinces have some implementation already. You charge a carbon tax, which is a consumption tax but also addresses global warming, and then refund the proceeds per capita creating a universal income. It won’t be huge amounts right away, but it’s a system you can build on.
As long as long as you will always make some more money with a higher income, the idea that taxes will actually disincentivize work seems pretty far fetched.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Many Anti UBI arguments seem to assume firstly that removing the threat of starvation and death would result in people simply ceasing to work, and that we need as many people working now to continue working or society would fall apart. I feel these are both innacurate beliefs. The country is chock full of people who could stop working and never work again a day in their lives, and yet they don't. On top or the fact that many people like to feel useful and like to work as a general thing, I think it's been well evidenced by this point that in most human psychology enough is never enough. This is often a curse, but the positive side is many people would continue working to be able to afford luxuries and a higher standard of living, even if they aren't going to die if they don't. And of the small number of people who do simply drop out of the labor force as we know it, many will likely do so to pursue their passions which are not currently economically rewarded or self sustaining, but are still contributing Culturally and materially to society, just not necessarily in ways currently arbitrarily favored by the current capital framework. And it's not like none of them will try to sell their work themselves, it's just less all or nothing if they don't always succeed.
It doesn’t have to be everyone.
If 8% of the people currently working left the labor market, it would cause problems.
Combine that with climate change related costs, which are going to be substantial. It’s going to be tough.
I don’t know how many people would leave the labor force with UBI. Nobody does. It will be some percentage. Less than 1% is a rounding error. More than 5% and we are on a highway to the danger zone.
I think more achievable ways to allow for better labor mobility. Raise the taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and use that to socialize medicine and raise minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
As long as long as you will always make some more money with a higher income, the idea that taxes will actually disincentivize work seems pretty far fetched.
It's because people downplay what rates are actually required to pay for it. Like it's just Musk and Bezos who would need to fund it.
The proposed 6.6t UBI would account for over half of the combined AGI of all 2021 tax fillers. It's basically the entire income of the top 25% of filers, which cuts off at about 88k/year.
Like the entire S&P 500 is about 30t in market cap and around a 20:1 PE ratio. You could seize the 500 largest US companies, funnel all their profits to pay for this, and it would not get you 1/4 the way there.
As long as long as you will always make some more money with a higher income, the idea that taxes will actually disincentivize work seems pretty far fetched.
It's because people downplay what rates are actually required to pay for it. Like it's just Musk and Bezos who would need to fund it.
The proposed 6.6t UBI would account for over half of the combined AGI of all 2021 tax fillers. It's basically the entire income of the top 25% of filers, which cuts off at about 88k/year.
Like the entire S&P 500 is about 30t in market cap and around a 20:1 PE ratio. You could seize the 500 largest US companies, funnel all their profits to pay for this, and it would not get you 1/4 the way there.
I would argue that what is actually important here is the break even point. If roughly speaking everyone already making over 20k a year just gets taxed an extra 20k and then gets 20k UBI, and you actually only really need to pay for everyone making less than 20k. Which by my terrible estimate based on various dubious assumptions is actually only like 1.3T that you need to get from wealth taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. Obviously you need to make the actual amounts phase in and not just have a cliff at a certain amount but that should ultimately work out basically the same.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
For example, back of the envelope, there are 210M 18+ adults in this country and 120M children. Let's say we give adults $1,000/month plus another $500/month for each child they have. That's 12 x [(210Mx1000)+(120mx500)] = $3.24 Trillion.
For scale, current income tax revenue is $2.4T. So we would need to increase income taxes 150% if we didn't cut other programs. Or total federal tax revenue (including social security, corporate profit, etc) is $4.4T. So we would need to increase that by about 74% if we didn't cut other programs. All of this puts us probably into the "not feasible" range, unless we are making strong assumptions about people not being affected by incentives.
So that means we either have to make the benefit much smaller or cut other programs. The biggest one is Social Security. After that, Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare. Then the military. If you are willing to contemplate cuts there, we might be able to put something together.
Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
It's also possible to do that by just using income tax too I think. Of course this doesn't zero it out entirely at the top, but it should allow a similar result. Using the existing tax structure may be less work to administer, at least... but it might also be easier to sabotage I guess (tax cuts, then call the UBI unfunded, the usual bullshit).
But yeah, I don't think it's remotely difficult to fund the program. It's just really easy to make big scary numbers with the idea.
I'm also not really sold on the idea that it's going to drive up prices a ton. You're redistributing money, not printing more - there's no change on monetary supply. Well, aside from less being taken out of the actual economy in favor of the stock market and other places it can be stashed and never spent.
If we did a UBI, there would be inflation, because that's what happens when you flood the economy with money. Just like when you raise the minimum wage. Wages go up, and so prices go up.
It's just that it doesn't matter - you give someone 20% more money, prices go up by 3%, they still have greater purchasing power. We don't need to try to game the economy or punish people who raise prices, we just figure those effects into the calculus to figure out what a good UBI would be.
Beyond that, we absolutely shouldn't dismantle the social safety net if we get a UBI in place. People will need to rely on it less, which is good, but there will always be cases where the UBI isn't enough.
"My husband died and I have no job and three kids and no savings." -> "Fuck you, we're already giving you your $1000 per month, what more do you want?" isn't a great situation.
and yet most of the public seems to believe that the absolutely insane amount of inflation we've had is from the last stimulus check, as if direct payments have like a 500% inflationary effect per dollar given
stupid media
I feel like now if we pass a UBI every company will just double prices on everything until popular support crushes the UBI
Companies set prices as a result of market forces not as part of a grand political conspiracy.
How many corporate price fixing schemes before this is incorrect?
As long as long as you will always make some more money with a higher income, the idea that taxes will actually disincentivize work seems pretty far fetched.
It's because people downplay what rates are actually required to pay for it. Like it's just Musk and Bezos who would need to fund it.
The proposed 6.6t UBI would account for over half of the combined AGI of all 2021 tax fillers. It's basically the entire income of the top 25% of filers, which cuts off at about 88k/year.
Like the entire S&P 500 is about 30t in market cap and around a 20:1 PE ratio. You could seize the 500 largest US companies, funnel all their profits to pay for this, and it would not get you 1/4 the way there.
I would argue that what is actually important here is the break even point. If roughly speaking everyone already making over 20k a year just gets taxed an extra 20k and then gets 20k UBI, and you actually only really need to pay for everyone making less than 20k. Which by my terrible estimate based on various dubious assumptions is actually only like 1.3T that you need to get from wealth taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. Obviously you need to make the actual amounts phase in and not just have a cliff at a certain amount but that should ultimately work out basically the same.
You have to shove that point way further up, otherwise the incentives to not work or cheat taxes get incredibly bizarre, because the marginal tax rate is just astronomical at low levels. Like working a job that pays you $15 a hour, but zeros out your UBI, means you effectively are working a job that pays you $5/hr.
Essentially half the US does not pay meaningful federal income tax. I believe the $0 paid figure was 47% in 2019, though it shot up north of 60% during covid because of stimulus stuff. But basically the pool of people you can tax an entire 20k UBI share from is a fraction of the number of people that will be receiving them.
The maximal case for a filer, from that 47% is that they will return 11% of the UBI in taxes.
(Note the chart is non-dependent filers)
You obviously have to massively increase rates.
Ball park numbers, the bottom half you pay UBI and see no meaningful tax returns back, So thats half of the 6.6t or 3.3t
The 3rd quartile you wash out(74th% pays more taxes 53% effectively gets more cash, but you wash it for the quartile overall), and the top quintile you soak.
The top quarter starts at 88k a filer, and collectively only has 6.75t in untaxed income.
You could double their current tax burden(in addition to just wiping out the 20k completely), and it would get you 1.3T. Triple it for the 1%, they are now paying 77% average tax rate. That brings you to 1.8T
a 78% marginal rate on any income over 155k, or something like a 57% tax rate on all income over $88k is about what it takes to come up with a spare 3.3t from "the rich". Now how many of those people are actually in a position to pay 10s of thousands of cash dollars in additional taxes...probably very few.
Also: This 20k number is crap. 20k is $10 an hour full time. I don't think most people here believe $10 is a livable wage. Which is the stated goal of what UBI will provide.
As long as long as you will always make some more money with a higher income, the idea that taxes will actually disincentivize work seems pretty far fetched.
It's because people downplay what rates are actually required to pay for it. Like it's just Musk and Bezos who would need to fund it.
The proposed 6.6t UBI would account for over half of the combined AGI of all 2021 tax fillers. It's basically the entire income of the top 25% of filers, which cuts off at about 88k/year.
Like the entire S&P 500 is about 30t in market cap and around a 20:1 PE ratio. You could seize the 500 largest US companies, funnel all their profits to pay for this, and it would not get you 1/4 the way there.
I would argue that what is actually important here is the break even point. If roughly speaking everyone already making over 20k a year just gets taxed an extra 20k and then gets 20k UBI, and you actually only really need to pay for everyone making less than 20k. Which by my terrible estimate based on various dubious assumptions is actually only like 1.3T that you need to get from wealth taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. Obviously you need to make the actual amounts phase in and not just have a cliff at a certain amount but that should ultimately work out basically the same.
You have to shove that point way further up, otherwise the incentives to not work or cheat taxes get incredibly bizarre, because the marginal tax rate is just astronomical at low levels. Like working a job that pays you $15 a hour, but zeros out your UBI, means you effectively are working a job that pays you $5/hr.
Essentially half the US does not pay meaningful federal income tax. I believe the $0 paid figure was 47% in 2019, though it shot up north of 60% during covid because of stimulus stuff. But basically the pool of people you can tax an entire 20k UBI share from is a fraction of the number of people that will be receiving them.
The maximal case for a filer, from that 47% is that they will return 11% of the UBI in taxes.
(Note the chart is non-dependent filers)
You obviously have to massively increase rates.
Ball park numbers, the bottom half you pay UBI and see no meaningful tax returns back, So thats half of the 6.6t or 3.3t
The 3rd quartile you wash out(74th% pays more taxes 53% effectively gets more cash, but you wash it for the quartile overall), and the top quintile you soak.
The top quarter starts at 88k a filer, and collectively only has 6.75t in untaxed income.
You could double their current tax burden(in addition to just wiping out the 20k completely), and it would get you 1.3T. Triple it for the 1%, they are now paying 77% average tax rate. That brings you to 1.8T
a 78% marginal rate on any income over 155k, or something like a 57% tax rate on all income over $88k is about what it takes to come up with a spare 3.3t from "the rich". Now how many of those people are actually in a position to pay 10s of thousands of cash dollars in additional taxes...probably very few.
Also: This 20k number is crap. 20k is $10 an hour full time. I don't think most people here believe $10 is a livable wage. Which is the stated goal of what UBI will provide.
At the moment it's what people are being asked to live off of with working. I know, it's wonderful.
Tinwhiskers, you're arguing from the current income tax scheme, which has been heavily nerfed by the rich. Additionally, it doesn't include capital gains taxes at all, which is a major vehicle for the uber rich to avoid taxation. Or charitable donations giving write offs.
Warren Buffet famously pays less in taxes than his secretary.
It's also worth noting that while our GDP is 21T, the gross income is only slightly over half that. Which leaves us with 9-10T unaccounted for.
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
Do you believe that there can be no ethical first world standard of living in any case, or just that it's currently impossible due to the way we exploit cheap labor and resources globally?
+1
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Many Anti UBI arguments seem to assume firstly that removing the threat of starvation and death would result in people simply ceasing to work, and that we need as many people working now to continue working or society would fall apart. I feel these are both innacurate beliefs. The country is chock full of people who could stop working and never work again a day in their lives, and yet they don't. On top or the fact that many people like to feel useful and like to work as a general thing, I think it's been well evidenced by this point that in most human psychology enough is never enough. This is often a curse, but the positive side is many people would continue working to be able to afford luxuries and a higher standard of living, even if they aren't going to die if they don't. And of the small number of people who do simply drop out of the labor force as we know it, many will likely do so to pursue their passions which are not currently economically rewarded or self sustaining, but are still contributing Culturally and materially to society, just not necessarily in ways currently arbitrarily favored by the current capital framework. And it's not like none of them will try to sell their work themselves, it's just less all or nothing if they don't always succeed.
It doesn’t have to be everyone.
If 8% of the people currently working left the labor market, it would cause problems.
Combine that with climate change related costs, which are going to be substantial. It’s going to be tough.
I don’t know how many people would leave the labor force with UBI. Nobody does. It will be some percentage. Less than 1% is a rounding error. More than 5% and we are on a highway to the danger zone.
I think more achievable ways to allow for better labor mobility. Raise the taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and use that to socialize medicine and raise minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
Would 5% be disastrous because of the effect on the economy due to people spending less, or because of the loss of productivity? To the first, well I think that's more than offset by the effects of the UBI, to the latter I consider the sheer amount of wasted effort and pointless work hours, combined with the increasing presence of automation, and I don't think it would be as much of an issue as you might be suggesting, I think if we eliminated a lot of the inefficiency and bullshit make work a lot more could get done with less people without overworking everyone. How much extra work people have to do is a failure of management and business at a cultural level.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
Do you believe that there can be no ethical first world standard of living in any case, or just that it's currently impossible due to the way we exploit cheap labor and resources globally?
The first one. First world living is entirely consumerist and exploitative. We wouldn’t have the plethora of cheap goods, particularly electronics, without anti-suicide nets at the factories and obliteration of the environment.
Now, could we have plentiful, healthy food, housing, and healthcare? Yes, I think so. Just, no cheap electronics or personal cars.
I could be very wrong, though, I’m far from an authority.
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
Do you believe that there can be no ethical first world standard of living in any case, or just that it's currently impossible due to the way we exploit cheap labor and resources globally?
The first one. First world living is entirely consumerist and exploitative. We wouldn’t have the plethora of cheap goods, particularly electronics, without anti-suicide nets at the factories and obliteration of the environment.
Now, could we have plentiful, healthy food, housing, and healthcare? Yes, I think so. Just, no cheap electronics or personal cars.
I could be very wrong, though, I’m far from an authority.
The electronics industry is heavily automated already and getting more so. The anti-suicide nets are because Steve Jobs wanted to be able to change the iPhone 3 months from release.
As is the car industry, for that matter (and car manufacturing was generally considered a good job previously).
Which is to say: the bad jobs that are much more difficult to get rid of are things like fruit picking.
Anytime an expensive policy is proposed and the funding amounts to "we'll reduce waste, fraud, and abuse", color me skeptical. Don't get me wrong, reducing WAF is always a good move. But it's much better to assume you are dealing with the world as it currently works.
The labor force participation rate is absolutely one of the single most important numbers for a country's output. It's basically LFPR times productivity; and again, we're not going to magically boost productivity. We always should try, it's fundamentally the source of our standard of living. But our entire system is already built around trying to maximize productivity.
Other than reducing labor waste, which is one of the key platforms of a UBI, what reduction of waste, fraud, and abuse has been proposed? The labor reduction comes from a reduced need for labor to work. Individuals will be able to decide if they want to continue their employment or not, and dead end / unfulfilling jobs will either be eliminated (if not necessary) or pay more (if necessary) to attract labor.
I would argue we are "magically" increasing productivity every year. Increases in automation and new technologies have greatly reduced the amount of time most tasks take.
As more and more things get automated, the productivity argument becomes less and less relevant. Automation has pretty much eaten into a fair bit of the entry level jobs and for the past decade plus, the bulk of the jobs added have been what's considered shit tier. We really should try to get some of UBI in place before automation hits a point where it easily contributes to unemployment. We should also disabuse ourselves of the notion that technology will also create more jobs than it replaces.
Also the productivity argument is a bunch of bullshit. A shit ton of people are stuck making shit commutes to work and that is going to do a number on their productivity. Throw in a bunch of work places just being shitty places to work at and that's even more productivity out the window.
I also have to wonder how much economic potential is lost because of how shit the work arrangement is for both the physical and mental health of people that have to work. How much are medical bills being driven up because of the people stuck doing really shitty and stressful commutes for their job? This is also a time suck they aren't compensated for, but are required to do as part of their job. How much are medical bill driven up by people that are constantly stressing about whether or not their boss will dick them over? How much are bills increased by people that also have to constantly stress about whether their job will continue to pay enough to cover required expenses? This is also shit that is only going to get worse as automation squeezes out more and more jobs. Hell, how many people are having health issues because they are stuck working a job they despise, but aren't in a position where they can get out of it in favor of a job they find less awful to work?
Kind of feel that implementing UBI would probably result in better productivity because the people still working would actually find some sort of fulfillment from their job without having to destroy themselves in the process. It would also force businesses to really consider the compensation package for the shit they can't automate, but that no one wants to do because the returns don't justify put up with all the crap it entails.
That said, you do still need things like medicare for all. It's not just that UBI doesn't pay for medical stuff, it's also that healthcare needs and costs are not uniform across individuals. A perfectly healthy 37 year old male is going to have significantly cheaper yearly medical expenses than someone like me who has a chronic health condition and there are individuals that even higher medical expenses than me. Same deal with other safety net stuff because disasters are still going to happen and assholes that steal other people's shit will also continue to be around.
Again, economic output is how much people work (labor force participation and average hours worked) and what their productivity is (output per hour worked). Yes, productivity tends to go up. That's what makes us richer. However, UBI is not going to make productivity increase more than it otherwise would; unless there is an extremely compelling story about it boosting the rate of technological progress.
Productivity is not if you like your job, if you are fulfilled, or how much money you make. Those are desirable social outcomes, but they are not output.
I think it is possible for us to imagine a future where productivity is so high that labor force participation and/or hours worked can decrease while maintaining a standard of living we find acceptable. It is likewise possible to foresee a future where automation is causing massive structural unemployment. However, that hasn't happened yet. Keynes, a person much smarter than me, was predicting that sort of thing a century ago and it hasn't happened yet.
I've been banging this drum a lot lately, and thought it would be worthwhile to resurrect this thread so we can discuss the benefits to adopting a Universal Basic Income as well as the challenges that implementation faces and how we could overcome them.
A Universal Basic Income, at its core, is a guaranteed standard of living by the government for all persons in their country. As implemented, our current capitalistic society requires individuals to be productive or die. By guaranteeing a standard of living, the artificial pressure to be productive is removed, and people can then choose to work to improve their standard of living or to pursue whatever their life goals would be.
As we've seen from recent discussions on this forum, automation continues it's inevitable march forward, displacing and replacing workers. Combined with a political system captured by the wealthiest, enacting a UBI is nearly impossible. But at one time, people thought the same thing about eliminating slavery, women's right to vote, and civil rights.
The state of nature is freezing/starving to death. Go to some uncontacted tribe never besmirched by capitalisms ugly tendrils and see if 'do nothing and be okay' is an actual option for anyone.
Maybe UBI is the best way to ensure some standard of living*, as compared to an explicit welfare state with government housing / foodstamps / Universal healthcare/ free child care/ etc. But the idea that there is some way for things to continue to improve or maintain this standard of living just via some sort of accumulated inertia is Star Trek universal replicator nonsense.
*I also think the case for UBI has a lot of underpinnings in assuming that exploitable labor in the developing world is just going to continue forever.
You can look at the US GDP per capita of 63500 and think that yeah, there should be some way to level that out so no one is above 90 or below 30 effectively. But the global GDP is only 11k. That American 30k being 'livible' depends a lot on cheap goods from overseas.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
Do you believe that there can be no ethical first world standard of living in any case, or just that it's currently impossible due to the way we exploit cheap labor and resources globally?
The first one. First world living is entirely consumerist and exploitative. We wouldn’t have the plethora of cheap goods, particularly electronics, without anti-suicide nets at the factories and obliteration of the environment.
Now, could we have plentiful, healthy food, housing, and healthcare? Yes, I think so. Just, no cheap electronics or personal cars.
I could be very wrong, though, I’m far from an authority.
The electronics industry is heavily automated already and getting more so. The anti-suicide nets are because Steve Jobs wanted to be able to change the iPhone 3 months from release.
As is the car industry, for that matter (and car manufacturing was generally considered a good job previously).
Which is to say: the bad jobs that are much more difficult to get rid of are things like fruit picking.
Yeah, the problem is there's a ton of manual tasks that are hard to automate and service jobs that are almost impossible to automate. These jobs are not easy to get rid of.
And there's another effect of this kind of thing too. Fruit picking is actually a decent example because the difficulty of automating agricultural work leads to changes in the product itself. Fresh produce is designed to be easier to automate and ship and all that kind of thing. Produce that is easier to automate gets cheaper and more plentiful and produce that is harder to automate gets more expensive and rarer. Automation doesn't just do the same thing the people were doing, it changes what is being done.
So I guess the implementation I am thinking of is actually more like negative income tax, and I'm not sure what the practical difference is between that and UBI.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
At one point virtually all human activity was directed towards meetings our basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter. In 1910, the US required ~14M people to support our agricultural industry. By the year 2000, that dropped to less than half a million.
All of that labor savings is due to increased automation in the farming industry. In the same time period, the population of the US tripled from 91M to 281M, meaning we went from 15.3% of the population devoted to feeding us to less than 0.2% of the population.
We're already at a point where productivity is so high that labor force participation and/or hours worked can be decreased without adversely affecting our standard of living. We hit massive structural unemployment when Covid shut down part of the economy. EU countries like France have moved to sub-40 hour work weeks as the norm, with greater amounts of vacation afforded for their citizens.
The way to fund UBI is to tax the obscenely wealthy for all their supposed excess. We've subsidized their lifestyles long enough with our collective labor for them to hoard and run up the scoreboard. That value should be harvested and distributed. There is very little stomach for this because people are paid to shout down this suggestion.
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
At one point virtually all human activity was directed towards meetings our basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter. In 1910, the US required ~14M people to support our agricultural industry. By the year 2000, that dropped to less than half a million.
All of that labor savings is due to increased automation in the farming industry. In the same time period, the population of the US tripled from 91M to 281M, meaning we went from 15.3% of the population devoted to feeding us to less than 0.2% of the population.
We're already at a point where productivity is so high that labor force participation and/or hours worked can be decreased without adversely affecting our standard of living. We hit massive structural unemployment when Covid shut down part of the economy. EU countries like France have moved to sub-40 hour work weeks as the norm, with greater amounts of vacation afforded for their citizens.
An interesting question I think is how do imports factory into this analysis. I'm guessing we both import and export a lot more food than we did in 1910. Should we add all the agricultural workers producing those imports and subtract the ones producing our exports?
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Any attempt at UBI would need to scale down with income. My preferred general method is taking a dollar off for every two dollars earned. So using your math and the bottom three brackets from here it drops down to somewhere around 624 billion. Easily achieved through higher taxes, especially on the rich.
1. You can set the benefit wherever you feel comfortable, but I personally think in the $20-30k USD per person is the range we need to target. As to who all gets it, everyone. Otherwise it's not really universal. And yes, the cost becomes large very quickly, because we're talking about the entire population of the US. If we look at the lower end, we're looking at roughly $20,000 * ~330,000,000 people = 20k * 330M = 20 * 330B = 6.6T = $6,600,000,000,000, or $6.6 trillion USD. The US GDP is ~$21 trillion, so we'd only need to use about a third of our productivity to ensure a good standard living for all.
Note: "~" means "about"
2. That's a great question with a very complicated answer. First off, you have to consider that productivity became divorced from real wage growth around 1970:
What this means is that while wages have remained relatively flat since 1970, going from ~1.75 to a 2.1 today, productivity went from 1.75 to 3.5. Almost all of this increased productivity is currently going to the uber rich, which is why wages have stagnated. If we were paid our fair share, their numbers couldn't go up.
In 1964, the rich started to gain capture of the government and the maximum tax was lowered from 90% to 70%. Today's taxes are much much lower with a cap of 37%, and capital gains taxes are likewise much lower. So we know the rich can bear the higher rates.
Now let's look at the budget. For 2022, it's slightly over $6.0T, with 65% allocated to mandatory spending programs, which are all of our social security programs. So slightly less than $4.0T is already allocated towards social programs, we would only have to raise taxes (or eat a deficit hit) to raise the remaining $2.6T. If we assume the entire budget is paid for by taxes (it's not) then that would mean that of our $21T GDP, only $6T is is used by the government. So there's up to $15T more that could be tapped. We would go from a total effective tax of (6T)/(21T) = 28.6% to (6T+2.6T)/(21T) = 41.0%. With the previously shown productivity gap, all of the additional taxation needed could be paid for just by taxing the rich.
So I think it's a very affordable program. And keep in mind that if you kept in means testing, having the UBI benefits drop off as your personal income increases, you can reduce the $6.6T number pretty significantly.
Living on a UBI is living on a fixed income, you'd only get $20k per year. Greedy corporations and landlords that raise prices would be doing so on a very price sensitive population, and would likely just price themselves out of the market. And the UBI won't happen in a vacuum, other regulations would also have to be passed to protect UBI recipients from the worst part of corporate capitalism. I can easily see the government, as a representative of the people, negotiating with apartment complex owners and the like to fix rents at an affordable rate. We already have programs right now that will help pay for construction of multi-unit housing in exchange for fixed rates and guaranteed rental unit allocations.
A functioning government representing the interests of the people is a necessary counterbalance to the excesses of unfettered capitalism.
is not compatible with doing this:
The social programs aren't a universal cash thing like UBI. Deducting them and giving out a UBI that's 40% the size of what you wanted doesn't equally out to doing a full UBI. 12k cash + social security /medicare you won't be eligible for for 40 years and can't use if you don't earn non-UBI income isn't the same thing as 30k cash.
The natural pressure is that of a desire to survive, not just freezing/starving to death. The artificial pressure is the inducement by fellow man that your survival is tied to your productivity. The hunter/gatherer tribe you're referring too didn't have quotas for number of spears to produce in a day.
Growth isn't unfettered, but there is a huge amount of room to grow, especially on the global scale. Better automation, developing electrical grids based on renewable resources from the ground up, etc. Developing nations have massive room to grow.
Part of getting to the endgame of a utopia is replacing human labor with automated labor, e.g. increasing automation. This will free up humanity to pursue whatever we decide we want to pursue, because we will no longer have to work. This can and should happen across the globe, and not just in one nation.
You should never be in that hypothetical, because a UBI should be paying for both the parents and the children. It's not just adults that get it, although in the case of minors the parent or guardian would get their payment so it can go towards necessities.
I'm not following?
Current Total Budget = $6T
Current % of Budget Spent on Social Programs = 65%
Current $ of Budget Spent on Social Programs = 65% * $6T =~$4T
Target needed for UBI = $6.6T
Gap between UBI and Social Programs = $6.6T - $4.0T = $2.6T
So we'd need to raise the budget from $6T to $8.6T and reallocate all social spending to the UBI to pay for the UBI.
Oh wait, I see the problem. Don't think of this as the initial form for UBI, think of this as the final form. The initial form would be implement a UBI with a cost of $2.6T, paid for in taxes, which would give everyone a UBI of ~$7,900 initially. Then as we see which social programs need less support or utilization, we could move their funding into the UBI pool and close out those programs. For example, a UBI should be able to completely replace social security.
And if we determine that some social security programs are too valuable to give up, then we keep those and increase taxes or deficit or etc etc to pay for the difference.
You can craft another hypothetical if you want, the point is that giving everyone $X and calling that good will result in some folks who wind up in situations where they need more than $X. Maybe due to blind misfortune, maybe due to past mistakes, whatever.
At that point, you either leave them to die in the streets, or you implement a social safety net. I assume the people talking about UBI are probably not of the "let them die in the streets" mindset, hence the need to figure out how a revised social safety net fits into this.
Doesn't UBI substantially change this calculation though? Labor isn't mobile partly because we don't have UBI. You can't simply chase a lower cost of living, because you'll be giving up support systems which are otherwise making things somewhat tenable. But under a regime with UBI, people can be much more mobile because the usual sticking elements - i.e. whatever job you have pins you to your current location - are much less so.
Assuming we are talking about my $1K/.5K/month baseline, I understand your proposal is to partially fund this by increasing the marginal tax rate of any post-UBI earnings up to 2xUBI post-UBI by 50 points.
So for a single individual for example, you’d want to add 50 percentage points to their marginal tax rate from the $12K to $36K bracket. Or for a family with three kids, we’re adding 50 points to their marginal tax rate from $42k to $124K.
If we take those 50 points, add maybe 12-22 points of existing marginal income tax rate, another 7-8 points of FICA, a couple points more for state and maybe local taxes; I think we might just fall off the Laffer Curve!
What?
It changes the numbers. It doesn't change the fact that the numbers exist.
Even with a social safety net, people fall through the cracks. Having no net at all and relying on a perfectly calibrated UBI system is just a recipe for disaster.
Maybe instead of a SNAP program that gets food to 10 million families you only need a SNAP program that serves 1 million families. Or 100,000 families. That's still 100,000 families we'd prefer didn't just starve to death, and not every family has a support system waiting on the wings, even if you assume infinite mobility.
and Medicaid covers medical treatment no UBI will ever pay for.
It's basically a restatement of Quid's proposal that UBI would be lowered by $1 for every $2 of income. So you get the full $12k/year benefit up front, but with an extra 50% income tax up to $24k, at which point the extra tax and UBI balances out. There might be a subtle difference here in when benefits are paid vs taxes, but the long term amount of benefits are the same.
Let me also restate that I don’t think the biggest work disincentive would be the UBI payment, as was mentioned people like to have more, but rather the huge implied marginal tax rates if we do aggressive phase outs (such as 2:1) and/or use income taxes to finance.
Let me put my chips on the table. I think we can fund a small amount of basic income (not yet enough to live on) right now, and we can pull it off if we fund it through consumption rather than income taxes to minimize the work incentive effects.
I think a good first step is looking at carbon tax and dividend programs. Two countries and half a dozen Canadian territories/provinces have some implementation already. You charge a carbon tax, which is a consumption tax but also addresses global warming, and then refund the proceeds per capita creating a universal income. It won’t be huge amounts right away, but it’s a system you can build on.
If 8% of the people currently working left the labor market, it would cause problems.
Combine that with climate change related costs, which are going to be substantial. It’s going to be tough.
I don’t know how many people would leave the labor force with UBI. Nobody does. It will be some percentage. Less than 1% is a rounding error. More than 5% and we are on a highway to the danger zone.
I think more achievable ways to allow for better labor mobility. Raise the taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and use that to socialize medicine and raise minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.
It's because people downplay what rates are actually required to pay for it. Like it's just Musk and Bezos who would need to fund it.
The proposed 6.6t UBI would account for over half of the combined AGI of all 2021 tax fillers. It's basically the entire income of the top 25% of filers, which cuts off at about 88k/year.
Like the entire S&P 500 is about 30t in market cap and around a 20:1 PE ratio. You could seize the 500 largest US companies, funnel all their profits to pay for this, and it would not get you 1/4 the way there.
I would argue that what is actually important here is the break even point. If roughly speaking everyone already making over 20k a year just gets taxed an extra 20k and then gets 20k UBI, and you actually only really need to pay for everyone making less than 20k. Which by my terrible estimate based on various dubious assumptions is actually only like 1.3T that you need to get from wealth taxes, corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. Obviously you need to make the actual amounts phase in and not just have a cliff at a certain amount but that should ultimately work out basically the same.
It's also possible to do that by just using income tax too I think. Of course this doesn't zero it out entirely at the top, but it should allow a similar result. Using the existing tax structure may be less work to administer, at least... but it might also be easier to sabotage I guess (tax cuts, then call the UBI unfunded, the usual bullshit).
But yeah, I don't think it's remotely difficult to fund the program. It's just really easy to make big scary numbers with the idea.
I'm also not really sold on the idea that it's going to drive up prices a ton. You're redistributing money, not printing more - there's no change on monetary supply. Well, aside from less being taken out of the actual economy in favor of the stock market and other places it can be stashed and never spent.
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How many corporate price fixing schemes before this is incorrect?
You have to shove that point way further up, otherwise the incentives to not work or cheat taxes get incredibly bizarre, because the marginal tax rate is just astronomical at low levels. Like working a job that pays you $15 a hour, but zeros out your UBI, means you effectively are working a job that pays you $5/hr.
Essentially half the US does not pay meaningful federal income tax. I believe the $0 paid figure was 47% in 2019, though it shot up north of 60% during covid because of stimulus stuff. But basically the pool of people you can tax an entire 20k UBI share from is a fraction of the number of people that will be receiving them.
The maximal case for a filer, from that 47% is that they will return 11% of the UBI in taxes.
(Note the chart is non-dependent filers)
You obviously have to massively increase rates.
Ball park numbers, the bottom half you pay UBI and see no meaningful tax returns back, So thats half of the 6.6t or 3.3t
The 3rd quartile you wash out(74th% pays more taxes 53% effectively gets more cash, but you wash it for the quartile overall), and the top quintile you soak.
The top quarter starts at 88k a filer, and collectively only has 6.75t in untaxed income.
You could double their current tax burden(in addition to just wiping out the 20k completely), and it would get you 1.3T. Triple it for the 1%, they are now paying 77% average tax rate. That brings you to 1.8T
a 78% marginal rate on any income over 155k, or something like a 57% tax rate on all income over $88k is about what it takes to come up with a spare 3.3t from "the rich". Now how many of those people are actually in a position to pay 10s of thousands of cash dollars in additional taxes...probably very few.
Also: This 20k number is crap. 20k is $10 an hour full time. I don't think most people here believe $10 is a livable wage. Which is the stated goal of what UBI will provide.
At the moment it's what people are being asked to live off of with working. I know, it's wonderful.
Warren Buffet famously pays less in taxes than his secretary.
It's also worth noting that while our GDP is 21T, the gross income is only slightly over half that. Which leaves us with 9-10T unaccounted for.
There’s no such thing as an ethical first world standard of living.
That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I think our current system is broken and the correction is coming, UBI sounds good, but what it truly looks like I don’t know.
Do you believe that there can be no ethical first world standard of living in any case, or just that it's currently impossible due to the way we exploit cheap labor and resources globally?
Would 5% be disastrous because of the effect on the economy due to people spending less, or because of the loss of productivity? To the first, well I think that's more than offset by the effects of the UBI, to the latter I consider the sheer amount of wasted effort and pointless work hours, combined with the increasing presence of automation, and I don't think it would be as much of an issue as you might be suggesting, I think if we eliminated a lot of the inefficiency and bullshit make work a lot more could get done with less people without overworking everyone. How much extra work people have to do is a failure of management and business at a cultural level.
The first one. First world living is entirely consumerist and exploitative. We wouldn’t have the plethora of cheap goods, particularly electronics, without anti-suicide nets at the factories and obliteration of the environment.
Now, could we have plentiful, healthy food, housing, and healthcare? Yes, I think so. Just, no cheap electronics or personal cars.
I could be very wrong, though, I’m far from an authority.
The electronics industry is heavily automated already and getting more so. The anti-suicide nets are because Steve Jobs wanted to be able to change the iPhone 3 months from release.
As is the car industry, for that matter (and car manufacturing was generally considered a good job previously).
Which is to say: the bad jobs that are much more difficult to get rid of are things like fruit picking.
The labor force participation rate is absolutely one of the single most important numbers for a country's output. It's basically LFPR times productivity; and again, we're not going to magically boost productivity. We always should try, it's fundamentally the source of our standard of living. But our entire system is already built around trying to maximize productivity.
tl;dr: wishful thinking does not fund programs.
I would argue we are "magically" increasing productivity every year. Increases in automation and new technologies have greatly reduced the amount of time most tasks take.
All program funding starts with wishful thinking.
Also the productivity argument is a bunch of bullshit. A shit ton of people are stuck making shit commutes to work and that is going to do a number on their productivity. Throw in a bunch of work places just being shitty places to work at and that's even more productivity out the window.
I also have to wonder how much economic potential is lost because of how shit the work arrangement is for both the physical and mental health of people that have to work. How much are medical bills being driven up because of the people stuck doing really shitty and stressful commutes for their job? This is also a time suck they aren't compensated for, but are required to do as part of their job. How much are medical bill driven up by people that are constantly stressing about whether or not their boss will dick them over? How much are bills increased by people that also have to constantly stress about whether their job will continue to pay enough to cover required expenses? This is also shit that is only going to get worse as automation squeezes out more and more jobs. Hell, how many people are having health issues because they are stuck working a job they despise, but aren't in a position where they can get out of it in favor of a job they find less awful to work?
Kind of feel that implementing UBI would probably result in better productivity because the people still working would actually find some sort of fulfillment from their job without having to destroy themselves in the process. It would also force businesses to really consider the compensation package for the shit they can't automate, but that no one wants to do because the returns don't justify put up with all the crap it entails.
That said, you do still need things like medicare for all. It's not just that UBI doesn't pay for medical stuff, it's also that healthcare needs and costs are not uniform across individuals. A perfectly healthy 37 year old male is going to have significantly cheaper yearly medical expenses than someone like me who has a chronic health condition and there are individuals that even higher medical expenses than me. Same deal with other safety net stuff because disasters are still going to happen and assholes that steal other people's shit will also continue to be around.
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Productivity is not if you like your job, if you are fulfilled, or how much money you make. Those are desirable social outcomes, but they are not output.
I think it is possible for us to imagine a future where productivity is so high that labor force participation and/or hours worked can decrease while maintaining a standard of living we find acceptable. It is likewise possible to foresee a future where automation is causing massive structural unemployment. However, that hasn't happened yet. Keynes, a person much smarter than me, was predicting that sort of thing a century ago and it hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, the problem is there's a ton of manual tasks that are hard to automate and service jobs that are almost impossible to automate. These jobs are not easy to get rid of.
And there's another effect of this kind of thing too. Fruit picking is actually a decent example because the difficulty of automating agricultural work leads to changes in the product itself. Fresh produce is designed to be easier to automate and ship and all that kind of thing. Produce that is easier to automate gets cheaper and more plentiful and produce that is harder to automate gets more expensive and rarer. Automation doesn't just do the same thing the people were doing, it changes what is being done.
All of that labor savings is due to increased automation in the farming industry. In the same time period, the population of the US tripled from 91M to 281M, meaning we went from 15.3% of the population devoted to feeding us to less than 0.2% of the population.
We're already at a point where productivity is so high that labor force participation and/or hours worked can be decreased without adversely affecting our standard of living. We hit massive structural unemployment when Covid shut down part of the economy. EU countries like France have moved to sub-40 hour work weeks as the norm, with greater amounts of vacation afforded for their citizens.
An interesting question I think is how do imports factory into this analysis. I'm guessing we both import and export a lot more food than we did in 1910. Should we add all the agricultural workers producing those imports and subtract the ones producing our exports?