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?
I feel like US food imports are pretty minimal other than specialty products...as I like to scream from the top of buildings, when you're growing alfalfa in a desert to sell to china for grain feed, there is probably some waste in the system.
I suspect that UBI is going to slide off the policy plate for a while, at least from a Canadian perspective (pop just under 40 million, for context):
- Demographic aging is constricting labour supply and it's only going to accelerate. Any further policies that have even a hint of further workforce contraction will be deeply unpopular. Retirements are shooting up, and the wave hasn't come close to cresting. 1 in 4 adults will be 65 or older by the mid 2030s. The figure we used today suggests that age-driven labour force departures account for 370,000 fewer workers since just 2019. It's a record labour shortage up here. One unemployed worker per job vacancy!
- Demographic aging is also increasing pressure on social services, retirement funds, and health care. By the 2040s Canada expects to have 4 million seniors in their 80s, which is when they will see the real impact of medical needs, home care, assistance, etc. Standard of living and access to social services will be under greater strain while a shrinking workforce offers a smaller tax base and key industries like health care and social assistance work are overworked and underpaid.
- We are expecting a recession. This is a bit of the opposite direction, and I don't know how a recession will interact with those other factors, but there will be a downturn. UBI is theoretically protective against downturns but is also the kind of ambitious civic project that is quietly ignored during a downturn, especially when governments still like just a little taste of austerity.
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?
I feel like US food imports are pretty minimal other than specialty products...as I like to scream from the top of buildings, when you're growing alfalfa in a desert to sell to china for grain feed, there is probably some waste in the system.
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.
Branding. UBI is the hip, new term.
Negative income tax proposals have been out for almost a century and recognize that a basic income will interact with our tax system and should be structured to make that sensible. Many UBI advocates tend to hand wave funding and marginal tax rate implications away behind grandiose rhetoric. But the math is the same for both.
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.
While I’m all for soaking the rich, I’m skeptical that alone would be able to fund UBI. Seems like UBI would require more thorough fundamental restructuring of society, not just taxing billionaires.
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.
While I’m all for soaking the rich, I’m skeptical that alone would be able to fund UBI. Seems like UBI would require more thorough fundamental restructuring of society, not just taxing billionaires.
But we could try that first...as a treat.
Also a lot of the cost estimates seem to presume the healthcare industry will remain the Akira like tumor on society it currently is.
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.
Did you see @Heffling's post on the previous page? Productivity has increased dramatically since the 70s, but wages have stayed stagnant. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do now to maintain our standard of living. All the gains for the past ~50 years have gone to the leeches at the top.
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.
While I’m all for soaking the rich, I’m skeptical that alone would be able to fund UBI. Seems like UBI would require more thorough fundamental restructuring of society, not just taxing billionaires.
The most obvious change, especially if children get paid full UBI, but not a required thing, is that a dual income household is basically dead for anyone with kids.
I know couples where one spouse walked away from comfortable jobs, because by the time day care,gas+ vehicle costs, taxes etc got added up they were working all year for effectively 1.50 an hour.
That point, where working doesn't make sense just gets pushed much higher. Because whatever plan is made to recapture the UBI at lower levels, or higher marginal tax rates middile class levels, now compounds with daycare as massive disincentive on the first 30/40/50k in wages.
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!
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
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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.
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.
Lost productivity and lost tax revenue. But the real kicker is going to be supply side inflation. Think Covid shortages but magnified. And frankly the bullshit positions with a lot of inefficiency are going to be the positions that don’t have people leaving the labor pool. I wouldn’t give up a bullshit position for UBI. But the makers and movers are likely working under Lean or Six Sigma. Or Lean Six Sigma, which is where you piss in a bottle because your AI task master is an asshole. Where there is minimal inefficiency.
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!
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were saying that you wanted to reduce UBI by $1 for every $2 earned. That’s an additional 50 percentage points marginal tax rate for the phase out range.
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.
Did you see @Heffling's post on the previous page? Productivity has increased dramatically since the 70s, but wages have stayed stagnant. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do now to maintain our standard of living. All the gains for the past ~50 years have gone to the leeches at the top.
Yes I did. That’s an interesting chart from an income distribution standpoint. However, it has no bearing on my argument. I’m talking about the affordability of UBI proposals that are thrown around. That’s based on our actual GDP, which is current productivity times hours worked. So all the extra productivity is already in the math and I still struggle to make the numbers work. Current wages versus that productivity don’t matter beyond some second order effects.
As I like to say, if you want to propose UBI, start with the numbers:
1. How much?
2. Who gets it?
Then we can calculate a cost and see what tax increases and/or spending cuts will get us there. And so far what I can think of to get to some of the huge proposals, like $20K/year, is not feasible; unless you are willing to do things like cancel Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare on top of big tax increases.
But again, now I’m talking grandiose generalities! Let’s do numbers! I’ll do my best to help.
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!
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were saying that you wanted to reduce UBI by $1 for every $2 earned. That’s an additional 50 percentage points marginal tax rate for the phase out range.
He wants $1 for every $2 earned above 12k, which is why he cites the 12-36k range. But we can set that value wherever we feel comfortable. Let's say that it goes from 0 depreciation of UBI at 40k to max depreciation at 60k, with a median of 50k per person*. That means for each individual with an income of 50k or more, or each household with an income of 100k or more, we wouldn't have to make any payouts. That's roughly 20% of the population that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing. That brings our needed 6.6T for a 20k/yr payout down to 5.3T, with even further reductions in the scale out period.
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!
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were saying that you wanted to reduce UBI by $1 for every $2 earned. That’s an additional 50 percentage points marginal tax rate for the phase out range.
He wants $1 for every $2 earned above 12k, which is why he cites the 12-36k range. But we can set that value wherever we feel comfortable. Let's say that it goes from 0 depreciation of UBI at 40k to max depreciation at 60k, with a median of 50k per person*. That means for each individual with an income of 50k or more, or each household with an income of 100k or more, we wouldn't have to make any payouts. That's roughly 20% of the population that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing. That brings our needed 6.6T for a 20k/yr payout down to 5.3T, with even further reductions in the scale out period.
*I know it's biased at the lower end, let me have ez math plz!
1)Wealth gain isn't a useful metric when you are discussing funding annual programs, because it is mostly just spot pricing of the stock market. The S&P500 had a market cap of 31.6t on 1/1/21 hit 40.36t on 1/1/22 it's now 30.1t So yeah, people with most their wealth tied into stock saw their wealth increase by 6t in 2021, it's now likely below where it was at the start of 2021. So where does that 10+t in funding come from. You take 80% of the 6.6t in gains and 80% of the negative 7t in loses?
2) "That's roughly 20% of the population[/url] that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing" Let us think about the corollary on this: 20% of the population, is then footing 100% of cost of the 5.3T annual UBI bill.
In 2018 Total Realized capital gains- not taxes paid, but total gains realized- was just 945b dollars(170b in taxes paid).
Go look in the last page on the total untaxed income of that 25%(I know you said 20 but I have these numbers) of people is only about 6.8t. You could tax 100% of capital gains(+770b) and 100% of all income over 155k per filer(most households, probably some single filers too), (+3331b) And you'd still need to tax another 1.3t(actually more because those income totals include the incomes below the cut off but w/e) out of the remaining 4t of untaxed income.
So basically, if you made it illegal for any taxpayer to have an income over $155k via straight confiscation of every extra dollar and confiscated all capital gains, every filer between 88k and 154k (which would the 25% of the population funding UBI) would still need to pay an extra $35k a year in taxes every year to pay for UBI. And that is already accounting for the 20k the get as UBI being immediately returned.
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.
Did you see Heffling's post on the previous page? Productivity has increased dramatically since the 70s, but wages have stayed stagnant. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do now to maintain our standard of living. All the gains for the past ~50 years have gone to the leeches at the top.
What's that look like per sector though?
Because afaik productivity increases are not uniform. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do on average. But that can be like 1 guy can run a car assembly line that used to take 20 but some produce is still picked by hand basically the same way it was 50 years ago.
The average teacher at my cities public schools system is paid 55k a year. Do you think urban public school teacher and 'someone with 17,000 in spare cash annually" are generally understood to be synonymous?
The average teacher at my cities public schools system is paid 55k a year. Do you think urban public school teacher and 'someone with 17,000 in spare cash annually" are generally understood to be synonymous?
I really don't care. I make less than 30k gross per year for a family of 3.
It's my opinion that anyone earning over $155k per year should have the excess amount confiscated.
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!
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were saying that you wanted to reduce UBI by $1 for every $2 earned. That’s an additional 50 percentage points marginal tax rate for the phase out range.
He wants $1 for every $2 earned above 12k, which is why he cites the 12-36k range. But we can set that value wherever we feel comfortable. Let's say that it goes from 0 depreciation of UBI at 40k to max depreciation at 60k, with a median of 50k per person*. That means for each individual with an income of 50k or more, or each household with an income of 100k or more, we wouldn't have to make any payouts. That's roughly 20% of the population that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing. That brings our needed 6.6T for a 20k/yr payout down to 5.3T, with even further reductions in the scale out period.
*I know it's biased at the lower end, let me have ez math plz!
1)Wealth gain isn't a useful metric when you are discussing funding annual programs, because it is mostly just spot pricing of the stock market. The S&P500 had a market cap of 31.6t on 1/1/21 hit 40.36t on 1/1/22 it's now 30.1t So yeah, people with most their wealth tied into stock saw their wealth increase by 6t in 2021, it's now likely below where it was at the start of 2021. So where does that 10+t in funding come from. You take 80% of the 6.6t in gains and 80% of the negative 7t in loses?
2) "That's roughly 20% of the population[/url] that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing" Let us think about the corollary on this: 20% of the population, is then footing 100% of cost of the 5.3T annual UBI bill.
In 2018 Total Realized capital gains- not taxes paid, but total gains realized- was just 945b dollars(170b in taxes paid).
Go look in the last page on the total untaxed income of that 25%(I know you said 20 but I have these numbers) of people is only about 6.8t. You could tax 100% of capital gains(+770b) and 100% of all income over 155k per filer(most households, probably some single filers too), (+3331b) And you'd still need to tax another 1.3t(actually more because those income totals include the incomes below the cut off but w/e) out of the remaining 4t of untaxed income.
So basically, if you made it illegal for any taxpayer to have an income over $155k via straight confiscation of every extra dollar and confiscated all capital gains, every filer between 88k and 154k (which would the 25% of the population funding UBI) would still need to pay an extra $35k a year in taxes every year to pay for UBI. And that is already accounting for the 20k the get as UBI being immediately returned.
EZ MATH
You know what, you're right. The math checks out. There's just not enough individual revenues in the US to tax and pay for a $20k UBI. Which means settling for a more modest UBI like proposed $12k, and also doing things like raising corporate taxes and closing offshore accounting practices.
A UBI needs to be easy to implement and use existing systems to the greatest extent possible.
If the UBI were $1000/month/person,
1) Everyone gets the same base UBI regardless of income
2) Payments are modified based on tax bracket, that is the taxes on the UBI are per-deducted from the monthly allotment. If you are in the 22% bracket, you get $780/month. In the 37% bracket, you get $630/month. 12% bracket and below gets the full UBI.
This should be simple to implement and based on information the IRS should already have. Similar to the child tax credit payments we had a year ago. Now, how do you pay for it?
Maybe something like:
1) Hire more IRS agents/lawyers
2) At some multiplier above the median household income ($70,784 in 2021, from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html), you start paying an equivalent UBI back into the system as a tax. So, if the multiplier is 3x ($212,352) and you made $247,744 (3.5x MHI), you pay an additional $6000 in tax. At 4x, $12000, at 5x, $24000 and so on. This essentially makes the top tax rate ~54% once your income gets high enough
3) Once you crest a certain income, tax deductions/exemptions start to fade in effectiveness. And they disappear completely over like $1 million.
4) Capital gains are income and taxed as such. As per (2), once you reach a certain income, you can't even deduct losses.
5) Increase corporate taxes
6) Large (5% or so) wealth tax over certain levels of wealth
Honestly I'm just mostly repeating others folks good ideas here. You pay for a UBI by revamping the tax system to ensure the wealthy must pay their fair share and remove the ability for those at the top to game the system. And you keep the implementation of the actual UBI payments as simple as possible and use existing methods/means/systems to do so.
Also, this is just brainstorming. It's not meant to be extremely rigorous.
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A UBI needs to be easy to implement and use existing systems to the greatest extent possible.
If the UBI were $1000/month/person,
1) Everyone gets the same base UBI regardless of income
2) Payments are modified based on tax bracket, that is the taxes on the UBI are per-deducted from the monthly allotment. If you are in the 22% bracket, you get $780/month. In the 37% bracket, you get $630/month. 12% bracket and below gets the full UBI.
This should be simple to implement and based on information the IRS should already have. Similar to the child tax credit payments we had a year ago. Now, how do you pay for it?
Maybe something like:
1) Hire more IRS agents/lawyers
2) At some multiplier above the median household income ($70,784 in 2021, from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html), you start paying an equivalent UBI back into the system as a tax. So, if the multiplier is 3x ($212,352) and you made $247,744 (3.5x MHI), you pay an additional $6000 in tax. At 4x, $12000, at 5x, $24000 and so on. This essentially makes the top tax rate ~54% once your income gets high enough
3) Once you crest a certain income, tax deductions/exemptions start to fade in effectiveness. And they disappear completely over like $1 million.
4) Capital gains are income and taxed as such. As per (2), once you reach a certain income, you can't even deduct losses.
5) Increase corporate taxes
6) Large (5% or so) wealth tax over certain levels of wealth
Honestly I'm just mostly repeating others folks good ideas here. You pay for a UBI by revamping the tax system to ensure the wealthy must pay their fair share and remove the ability for those at the top to game the system. And you keep the implementation of the actual UBI payments as simple as possible and use existing methods/means/systems to do so.
Also, this is just brainstorming. It's not meant to be extremely rigorous.
Again, the issue here everyone keeps desperately trying to ignore is that there aren't that many rich people and even fewer super rich people.
The further up the income curve you try to spread UBI- so your sort of prototypical middle class workers - teachers/plumbers/nurses etc - are in favor of it because it gives them money, the more it costs and the smaller the pool to pay for it is.
It can be true that, that there are a number of people who are obscenely rich, and should be taxed more. And also that all that wealth still isn't enough to provide 1000s of dollars a year to 150/200/250 million people.
The entirety of Amazons 2021 'I only shop from my couch' boosted earnings(And by extension almost all of Bezos's "Wealth" and any cap gains ever made selling AMZN) would amount to an $8.25 a month UBI.
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I feel like US food imports are pretty minimal other than specialty products...as I like to scream from the top of buildings, when you're growing alfalfa in a desert to sell to china for grain feed, there is probably some waste in the system.
- Demographic aging is constricting labour supply and it's only going to accelerate. Any further policies that have even a hint of further workforce contraction will be deeply unpopular. Retirements are shooting up, and the wave hasn't come close to cresting. 1 in 4 adults will be 65 or older by the mid 2030s. The figure we used today suggests that age-driven labour force departures account for 370,000 fewer workers since just 2019. It's a record labour shortage up here. One unemployed worker per job vacancy!
- Demographic aging is also increasing pressure on social services, retirement funds, and health care. By the 2040s Canada expects to have 4 million seniors in their 80s, which is when they will see the real impact of medical needs, home care, assistance, etc. Standard of living and access to social services will be under greater strain while a shrinking workforce offers a smaller tax base and key industries like health care and social assistance work are overworked and underpaid.
- We are expecting a recession. This is a bit of the opposite direction, and I don't know how a recession will interact with those other factors, but there will be a downturn. UBI is theoretically protective against downturns but is also the kind of ambitious civic project that is quietly ignored during a downturn, especially when governments still like just a little taste of austerity.
US food exports dwarf our imports by an order of magnitude. We exported $177B in 2021.
Branding. UBI is the hip, new term.
Negative income tax proposals have been out for almost a century and recognize that a basic income will interact with our tax system and should be structured to make that sensible. Many UBI advocates tend to hand wave funding and marginal tax rate implications away behind grandiose rhetoric. But the math is the same for both.
While I’m all for soaking the rich, I’m skeptical that alone would be able to fund UBI. Seems like UBI would require more thorough fundamental restructuring of society, not just taxing billionaires.
But we could try that first...as a treat.
Also a lot of the cost estimates seem to presume the healthcare industry will remain the Akira like tumor on society it currently is.
Did you see @Heffling's post on the previous page? Productivity has increased dramatically since the 70s, but wages have stayed stagnant. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do now to maintain our standard of living. All the gains for the past ~50 years have gone to the leeches at the top.
The most obvious change, especially if children get paid full UBI, but not a required thing, is that a dual income household is basically dead for anyone with kids.
I know couples where one spouse walked away from comfortable jobs, because by the time day care,gas+ vehicle costs, taxes etc got added up they were working all year for effectively 1.50 an hour.
That point, where working doesn't make sense just gets pushed much higher. Because whatever plan is made to recapture the UBI at lower levels, or higher marginal tax rates middile class levels, now compounds with daycare as massive disincentive on the first 30/40/50k in wages.
No, I would not want to do that. Not receiving UBI doesn't automatically jump to supporting all others using UBI. Benefits decrease with income, taxes rise on the richest first and scale down to other incomes. In this scenario there is zero reason for automatic taxation on anyone making over $12k.
And all of this magnified by Climate change.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought you were saying that you wanted to reduce UBI by $1 for every $2 earned. That’s an additional 50 percentage points marginal tax rate for the phase out range.
Yes I did. That’s an interesting chart from an income distribution standpoint. However, it has no bearing on my argument. I’m talking about the affordability of UBI proposals that are thrown around. That’s based on our actual GDP, which is current productivity times hours worked. So all the extra productivity is already in the math and I still struggle to make the numbers work. Current wages versus that productivity don’t matter beyond some second order effects.
As I like to say, if you want to propose UBI, start with the numbers:
1. How much?
2. Who gets it?
Then we can calculate a cost and see what tax increases and/or spending cuts will get us there. And so far what I can think of to get to some of the huge proposals, like $20K/year, is not feasible; unless you are willing to do things like cancel Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare on top of big tax increases.
But again, now I’m talking grandiose generalities! Let’s do numbers! I’ll do my best to help.
He wants $1 for every $2 earned above 12k, which is why he cites the 12-36k range. But we can set that value wherever we feel comfortable. Let's say that it goes from 0 depreciation of UBI at 40k to max depreciation at 60k, with a median of 50k per person*. That means for each individual with an income of 50k or more, or each household with an income of 100k or more, we wouldn't have to make any payouts. That's roughly 20% of the population that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing. That brings our needed 6.6T for a 20k/yr payout down to 5.3T, with even further reductions in the scale out period.
The richest 1% gained $6.5T in wealth in 2021. They can afford this program with no appreciable hit to their standard of living.
*I know it's biased at the lower end, let me have ez math plz!
1)Wealth gain isn't a useful metric when you are discussing funding annual programs, because it is mostly just spot pricing of the stock market. The S&P500 had a market cap of 31.6t on 1/1/21 hit 40.36t on 1/1/22 it's now 30.1t So yeah, people with most their wealth tied into stock saw their wealth increase by 6t in 2021, it's now likely below where it was at the start of 2021. So where does that 10+t in funding come from. You take 80% of the 6.6t in gains and 80% of the negative 7t in loses?
2) "That's roughly 20% of the population[/url] that is no longer taking from the UBI, only contributing" Let us think about the corollary on this: 20% of the population, is then footing 100% of cost of the 5.3T annual UBI bill.
In 2018 Total Realized capital gains- not taxes paid, but total gains realized- was just 945b dollars(170b in taxes paid).
Go look in the last page on the total untaxed income of that 25%(I know you said 20 but I have these numbers) of people is only about 6.8t. You could tax 100% of capital gains(+770b) and 100% of all income over 155k per filer(most households, probably some single filers too), (+3331b) And you'd still need to tax another 1.3t(actually more because those income totals include the incomes below the cut off but w/e) out of the remaining 4t of untaxed income.
So basically, if you made it illegal for any taxpayer to have an income over $155k via straight confiscation of every extra dollar and confiscated all capital gains, every filer between 88k and 154k (which would the 25% of the population funding UBI) would still need to pay an extra $35k a year in taxes every year to pay for UBI. And that is already accounting for the 20k the get as UBI being immediately returned.
EZ MATH
What's that look like per sector though?
Because afaik productivity increases are not uniform. We don't have to work nearly as much as we do on average. But that can be like 1 guy can run a car assembly line that used to take 20 but some produce is still picked by hand basically the same way it was 50 years ago.
The average teacher at my cities public schools system is paid 55k a year. Do you think urban public school teacher and 'someone with 17,000 in spare cash annually" are generally understood to be synonymous?
I really don't care. I make less than 30k gross per year for a family of 3.
It's my opinion that anyone earning over $155k per year should have the excess amount confiscated.
You know what, you're right. The math checks out. There's just not enough individual revenues in the US to tax and pay for a $20k UBI. Which means settling for a more modest UBI like proposed $12k, and also doing things like raising corporate taxes and closing offshore accounting practices.
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That would stop being UBI then. The whole point is that everyone gets it.
If the UBI were $1000/month/person,
1) Everyone gets the same base UBI regardless of income
2) Payments are modified based on tax bracket, that is the taxes on the UBI are per-deducted from the monthly allotment. If you are in the 22% bracket, you get $780/month. In the 37% bracket, you get $630/month. 12% bracket and below gets the full UBI.
This should be simple to implement and based on information the IRS should already have. Similar to the child tax credit payments we had a year ago. Now, how do you pay for it?
Maybe something like:
1) Hire more IRS agents/lawyers
2) At some multiplier above the median household income ($70,784 in 2021, from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html), you start paying an equivalent UBI back into the system as a tax. So, if the multiplier is 3x ($212,352) and you made $247,744 (3.5x MHI), you pay an additional $6000 in tax. At 4x, $12000, at 5x, $24000 and so on. This essentially makes the top tax rate ~54% once your income gets high enough
3) Once you crest a certain income, tax deductions/exemptions start to fade in effectiveness. And they disappear completely over like $1 million.
4) Capital gains are income and taxed as such. As per (2), once you reach a certain income, you can't even deduct losses.
5) Increase corporate taxes
6) Large (5% or so) wealth tax over certain levels of wealth
Honestly I'm just mostly repeating others folks good ideas here. You pay for a UBI by revamping the tax system to ensure the wealthy must pay their fair share and remove the ability for those at the top to game the system. And you keep the implementation of the actual UBI payments as simple as possible and use existing methods/means/systems to do so.
Also, this is just brainstorming. It's not meant to be extremely rigorous.
Taxes.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
Again, the issue here everyone keeps desperately trying to ignore is that there aren't that many rich people and even fewer super rich people.
The further up the income curve you try to spread UBI- so your sort of prototypical middle class workers - teachers/plumbers/nurses etc - are in favor of it because it gives them money, the more it costs and the smaller the pool to pay for it is.
It can be true that, that there are a number of people who are obscenely rich, and should be taxed more. And also that all that wealth still isn't enough to provide 1000s of dollars a year to 150/200/250 million people.
The entirety of Amazons 2021 'I only shop from my couch' boosted earnings(And by extension almost all of Bezos's "Wealth" and any cap gains ever made selling AMZN) would amount to an $8.25 a month UBI.