The trick is you shouldn’t lose money on a dollar for dollar basis when you earn. So, for example, for each dollar you earn you earn you lose only 50 cents of ubi.
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You may be talking about the Mincome experiment:
So if you make $20k, they will kick in 14K for your efforts, bringing you up to 34K
That’s not bad, but it should have the stipulation that you are and remain gainfully employed, or are verifiably disabled.
Otherwise you get some slug living in the basement wearing the same set of underpants year after year soaking up 24k for doing nothing while the next guy is busting his hump to get an extra 14k
The overall result could be tweaked to fall somewhere between the two by giving UBI in addition to other income and taxing the total at a reasonable marginal rate – that way, each dollar earned would add something reasonably close to a dollar to the earner’s final after-tax income.
The threat of starvation comes from nature itself, not from society. Money does not create food, clothing, and shelter. Someone has to till the fields, make the clothes, and build the houses. That’s why I maintain that a basic income would not be practical on a large scale unless we also have large scale automation. If nobody is producing anything, then all the money in the world is worthless.
I freely admit that I would much rather be a lazy bum and not have to work, and with a sufficient guaranteed income, would not work, so part of my assumption is that a sizeable chunk of the population feels the same way.
I think it shows that a society with an abundance of resources and production can afford to give everyone a higher standard of living.
I’ve worked in a few low-paying, menial jobs (never minimum wage, but pretty darn close) over the years, and it always seemed like the worst treatment came from the employers, not the general public. You can educate people, but that only goes so far. Some people are just dicks.
No. I paid into SocSec. It is Insurance/pension, not a handout.
What would happen? Taxes would rise and taxpayers would bitch about lazy people living off the dole. Just like today, but with more correctness.
With any effort at all today in America, you will not be hungry. Homeless, yes, sure. But not hungry.
Good questions!
I agree with the hungry part. But hunger still existing here in America was one of the reasons given to have UBI. I just don’t think it’s a good one. I guess I have a more pessimistic view of things, because I think there would be many people who would just live off the UBI and not get a job or whatever. And I certainly don’t think they will start to paint, or sculpt or whatever artisanal endeavors some of you think will happen.
It depends on the UBI level. But if people were willing to live at low income levels (say $750/month=$9,000/year) they currently have the option of maintaining this level of income by part-time jobs. But you see very few people doing this. Instead they have full-time jobs or a combination of part-time jobs so they can make substantially more income than this.
You’re a telemarketer who preys on the elderly. You deserve everything you get.
I agree in the latter case it could tend toward disaster. In economic terms it would result in an even higher, perhaps sky high, effective marginal income tax rate for people in low wage jobs. That’s a big problem with many welfare state programs now in the US, how not qualifying or qualifying less for various public subsidies (housing costs, medical, EITC etc) as you earn your way out of poverty adds up to a high enough effective marginal tax rate to seriously affect the incentive to do so. A UBI could make problem that much worse, though the degree depends on the implementation.
However an unconditional UBI is a huge cost. An Economist article ran through some numbers in detail but even more back of envelope $20k for every person in the US is ~$6.4 tril a year, v ~$3.6tril current federal spending, some but not nearly all of which would naturally be replaced by the UBI. And saying ‘it would be beneficial by moving money from the wealthy’, even besides any moral problem some might see with that idea at such a scale, would have to mean a pretty complete revolution in politics and the economy to siphon up to three times as much money from private sector through the govt for redistribution. Even those prone to dismiss taxation incentive arguments when it comes to taxes on high incomes would have to think twice about the incentive effect of tax hikes that massive, I think. So giving the UBI unconditionally you’re reducing the worst negative incentive effects of people for whom $20k is a large amount, but have to come up with a way to take away another ~1/3 of GDP from people who make higher incomes without a devastatingly negative incentive effect there.
Of course there could be some case in the middle with some income or age (for minors or Social Security recipients) restrictions on who gets how much UBI, but IMO it gets a lot of attention for something so obviously infeasible politically, at least in the US.
True, but there is a big difference between $9,000/year and $15,000/year. Especially if a couple both get it, and their kids get it.
I support a UBI and single payer health care since I think it is the way that the government can fix some of the inequality inherent in the system in the least invasive way. I would propose $1,000 per month per citizen who lived inside the country and then I would remove all safety nets while implementing single payer health care (there would be some safety nets depending on how you define them like public education). The $1,000 would have to be indexed to inflation but I would only allow it to be adjusted every 10 years to help minimize a hyperinflation feedback loop.
So how would it get paid for? The Kaiser Foundation says that 93% of the US population is citizens so there are 298.9 million people who we’d cut a check to monthly or a total annual budget for the program of $3.5868 trillion. Federalsafetynet.com says that the Federal government spent $711B and the states spent an additional $49B on welfare (non-medicade) plus $888 billion for social security. $1.648T of the program or 45.9% would be paid for by cutting those programs. The remaining could be paid for by a system that targets non-citizens in the country so I’d go with a additional 10% sales tax that would be applied to everything from stock and house sales to pieces of candy and corn to the distillery.
You cant replace SocSec with UBI. We paid into SocSec and benefits are usually higher., sometimes much higher. Millions of Senior Citizens would lose their homes, go into bankruptcy, etc.
Considering I’m only proposing a reduction of 25% from the average social security payment I don’t think it’s nearly as bleak as you’re making it sound. Especially when it is paired with a single payer system since the average retiree is spending 26% of their social security for health care so overall they’d get about a 1% raise.
Milton Friedman’s concept of the ideal welfare state was just one payment, a negative income tax he called it, pretty much a conditional (on other income) UBI, though not the same as an unconditional UBI (literally everybody or any income). Most people on this forum are probably well to the left of Milton Freidman. The point being, you can shape a particular mechanism, like a UBI, to meet widely ranging goals. The problem is, the polity has a lot of entrenched interests with sharply differing goals. It’s possible a new mechanism could make it easier to reach a consensus on the goal, but in this case it doesn’t seem likely to me, to put it mildly.
One big question about your concept is just saying ‘single payer’ doesn’t get around the issue of who pays for ‘single payer’ if the details are such that retirees pay less than they now do under Medicare. And ‘every other developed country…’ doesn’t answer that, how exactly you get costs down or taxes up to a system that costs less for retirees in actual US political and economic conditions. It really wouldn’t be the general place to start thinking about US healthcare reform IMO, making old people (regardless of means) pay an even smaller % of the real cost of caring for them than the already -small % they pay now (I mean again currently, not useless water-under-the-bridge discussions of taxes people paid and which were spent long ago).
Anyway I think the post you answered makes a more difficult to get around point than you acknowledge. The current US system is generous relatively speaking to retirees. And ‘but they paid into the system for years!’ while highly politically relevant is economically irrelevant. Economically if they pay less/get more now, somebody else has to get less/pay more now. But UBI is trying mainly to reduce ‘inequality’ and/or fight the (supposed) coming cascade of job losses due to automation among working age people. Start with a system which doesn’t reduce the generosity (economically, not politico-morally, save that for elsewhere) to old people and the numbers for UBI are all the more daunting. Make it less generous to old people (like some proposals have been in fact) and the already dubious political feasibility goes completely out the window.
Bertrand Russel proposed a plan that seems good to me. A bare minimum is paid to everyone, say enough for a basic diet of home cooked food and adequate shelter for security and dignity. Any person who wants more than that will be obliged to work for supplemental wages. The number of people who choose to consume will balance the number of people who choose to work productively. A great majority would work and consume, just as is the case now,but with an added measure of security. There would also be a demographic of people on contented leisure. A gain for all sides.
That’s more or less how I see it working out. It would just be a bigger security blanket, with the added result that the power balance between employers and employees would shift some towards the worker bees. I suppose a few people would be content doing nothing productive and being poor but I don’t get that thought process at all.
Hunger isn’t necessarily the exact issue, it’s just shorthand for talking about food insecurity. Sure, very few, if any Americans are starving to death. But food insecurity creates enormous problems here and does affect a significant population. cite