You do that and there will be an enormous number of jobs created that pay $20/month.
That is the most likely result. But I think at some point there would be price point contention for workers, albeit at low levels, and we’d find the “true value” of a lot of jobs that are worth less than minimum wage now.
And while I can easily imagine a class of people happy with their poverty level jobs they work for 1 hour a month, I think in general people will work more as there will be a better direct benefit (i.e. a steadily increasing wage)
Well, as I said, I kinda like this “welfare” scheme. But I just don’t see the math working out.
One thing I missed in your OP (which doesn’t mean it isn’t there, I may just have misread) is that these schemes usually also advocate an elimination of deduction and tax brackets to simplify the tax system, which would probably also increase revenue in a progressive fashion.
When I have done the math on this in my own version of these ideas, the tax rate to keep basic government services running is in the roughly 60% range. Of everything except the money handed out by the government.
Some social security payments go to people living outside the U.S., who may not even be U.S. citizens. (I’m receiving SS myself, since I worked in the U.S. for 12 years, and I have reached retirement age.) How do those fit into the picture? It would be unfair to take away the SS that we paid for, without replacing it with anything else.
Could you share those calculations with us?
SS is not like a retirement fund, it’s really more wealth distribution. I get that you’d be mad if the payments cut off, but that doesn’t make it ‘not fair’.
I was actually looking for the math and assumptions I was making at the time. I also did a conversion to sales tax to try and fund it (a bit more pretty) but i cannot find the papers I did the work on.
I was thinking about back tracking from 60% and trying to recreate it, but that seems a little…like cheating.
The shortfall is about 600B. The total revenue from income taxes in US - local, state and federal is 1.9T. Adding 600B would be a huge increase.
No, not unless you want people to pay for their own health care costs, which it doesn’t sound like you want. Without regulatory agencies like the FDA and EPA, we’d be China. “Oops! Sorry about all the melamine we’ve been feeding ya’ll! Just ignore the menstruating babies and cancerous lesions!” And if public water supply is polluted, what are people supposed to do? Go out and buy Brita filters and hope for the best? That’s some craziness right there.
Regulatory agencies protect the economy just as much as they protect the general welfare. They help businesses make money by providing at least an illusion of safety and security for the consumer, so that people will buy things with a carefree attitude. Imagine how depressing it would be to walk into a grocery store and see “BUY AT YOUR OWN RISK!” plastered all over the wall. I want to fix poverty too, but not at the expensive of public health.
You might be interested in this thread.
This not quite right. The budget projections for 2013 have individual income taxes at $1.359T, payroll tax at $0.959T, and corporate income tax at $0.348T, which accounts for $2.666T, at just the federal level. According to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/, total government spending, including state and local, is $6.4T, and I’m comfortable including that since many of the current programs for the poor are administered/paid for at the state and local level.
I’m not trying to dog you on this, just citing some figures.
I may try to run the numbers later tonight and post that.
I used that same site to come up with numbers based on the take home for the feds and state/locals, but based them on 2011, the last year we have data for.
My very rough math is here.
I don’t know if this is a real or a wild/joke proposal, but:
http://news.msn.com/world/swiss-to-vote-on-dollar2800-monthly-income-for-all-adults?stay=1
A grassroots committee is calling for all adults in Switzerland to receive an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs — about $2,800 — per month from the state, with the aim of providing a financial safety net for the population.
Organizers submitted more than the 100,000 signatures needed to call a referendum on Friday and tipped a truckload of 8 million five-cent coins outside the parliament building in Bern, one for each person living in Switzerland.
Under Swiss law, citizens can organize popular initiatives that allow the channeling of public anger into direct political action. The country usually holds several referenda a year.
I wonder what happens if the referendum passes (why wouldn’t you vote for someone giving you $2,800 a month?) and there is nowhere near enough tax money to pay for it.
Crude calc: Switzerland has about 6.5M “adults” - that would make the handout cost 6.5M * 2800 * 12 = $218B annually. Switzerland’s budget in 2010 was $67B. You draw your own conclusions.
Consider a modification of it: two-tiered citizenship. Everyone qualifies for the basic tier, in which you get poverty-level wages. At this tier, you are limited in what you can purchase: you aren’t allowed to own or drive a car (since road taxes are expensive), you can’t attend public schools past the age of, say, 22 (to give folks time to get a basic degree), you can’t earn more than, say, $10,000 a year in additional income.
If you’d like to do so, you can switch to the upper tier, in which your monthly payments decrease to zero over a period of, say, three months (to give time for a transition), and you gain access to everything you couldn’t access before.
If you then go back on subsistence, you have a waiting period–maybe three years?–before you can go off subsistence again.
I’m not crazy about this proposal, but I think it’d drastically reduce the cost.
Upper tier people, they get special drinking fountains? Seating arrangements in pubic transportation?
Switzerland has its own national bank, though. So the alternative would be for the Swiss central bank to buy 218B annually of Swiss bonds, and to use that revenue to fund the program.
I am sure borrowing 1/3 of its GDP annually will do wonders for Switzerland.
Well, it’d eliminate unemployment, if they have any of that there.
Funny thing - while googling about this I came across the democraticunderground thread on it. Not one post out of 200 on the thread thought to actually calculate how much that measure would cost and compare it to Switzerland’s budget. But most think it’s a great idea. Hilarious.
It’s the nature of a budget that it can be changed. Your income is limited by the size of yor paycheck. Switzerland’s income is whatever it wants it to be.