That is sort of the basic premise for a fair amount of SF universes - some it is neutral, some it is beneficial and some it is part of the plot bunny for the negative happenings in the universe.
What I could imagine would be a shakeup. If you look at Bucky Fuller’s Old Man River City, it is a planned circular community where each living space has a balcony space, there are shopping and light industrial areas, schools and recreation areas. He has it domed over for environmental control, but I think that is a bit excessive. However, I think he does have a good point.
If we took a look at the problem with overcrowded cities, there is a lack of jobs, a problem with the infrastructure not keeping up with the needs of the population, grocery store desert areas [the population is deemed not profitable enough to keep a grocery store in the place so the poor people end up with fast food and convenience stores] and mass transit is inadequate.
If you grant that advances in the entertainment and communications industries make it possible to have the same non-live entertainment and communications in Manhattan as it is in Padukah, there is no real reason that you have to actually live in Manhattan if you don’t need to.
So, why not determine the best places to place a series of Old Man River Cities to siphon off the population of the cities. They can have their guaranteed cubage of living space, with the issue wall mounted entertainment center, the debit card of guaranteed annual income, the unified commissary/exchange [super walmart], Unified School [K-PhD] and Community Hospital and allow a certain amount of free enterprise business space for jobs for those that would like to work. Move them out of the city where they were complaining of no opportunities to where they can have the chance for decent living space, food, health, education and a job if they want something more than basic living allowance. There would still be the chance of a McDonalds and Old Navy and everything, but if you didn’t want to actually bother with spending money, you could use the basic allowance stuff. Best of both worlds. If you want to draw a heroin allowance and trank yourself to death, not a big deal and since you could get it free you wouldn’t be screwing over a boss and committing crimes for your fix…
I remember the first time this was tried, when it was called Social Credit. Canada was into it. My province elected Social Credit governments for 34 straight years. It wasn’t a great idea then, and it’s not a great idea now.
There are many problems with the idea. One is that you have no way of knowing what the right amount of money is. Give to much and you create a dependency class that doesn’t work. If you don’t give enough, people can’t survive. And since the cost of living is different depending on where you live and your life circumstances, no one number works for everyone. And if you get the amount wrong, you risk freezing people in place and destroying both geographic and income mobility.
It might be instructive to look at the result of guaranteed income programs for Native populations. As best I can tell, the primary effect has been the creation of reservation ghettos and the creation of a permanent dependent underclass.
Don’t apologize, dude. You did a better job that I was willing to do. Bottom line is there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and you can’t have ‘middle class’ benefits, without having ‘middle class’ taxes, because that’s where all the money is.
Each individual rich person gets a big slice of the pie. But there ain’t all that many rich people getting slices. Most of the pie belongs to the middle class, and you can’t give them benefits from ‘taxes on the rich’. If you’re going to give bennies to the ‘middle class’, you have to tax that middle class to get the money for their bennies. There just ain’t enough money in rich people’s pockets.
If you take an exclusive definition of “rich”, maybe. But over half of the national income goes to the top income-quintile. They do in fact, have more of the pie then the three-middle class quintiles put together (or all four lower quintiles, even).
How much of that is for medical costs? I want everyone to have health care outside of the yearly stipend, so we have to subtract those costs. Maybe $10,000.00 a year won’t pay for everything, but I did say maybe it would reduce some of those costs, rather than completely eliminate them.
This is an idea whose time may come, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Right now society is still transitioning from pre-industrial social values to post-industrial ones, and one of those is how we regard work. As automation increases we may eventually reach a point where except for design and top-level decision making, production of material goods may require almost no human labor. At that point what do we do? Let everyone who isn’t a stockholder or a technical specialist starve to death? Or give everyone a fabricator and a share of the output of the cornucopia?
Ironically, something like communism (in Marx’s utopian sense of the term) may come about once labor has become nearly valueless, thanks to a development classic Marxism never anticipated: industrialism replacing people altogether, rather than just making them laborers. I’m reminded of a remark from one of the Star Trek series, in which a character says that humans never solved society’s economic problems so much as they outgrew them.
I don’t see the need for such brusqueness considering I am not in support of the measure and there was a whole thread on it before.
But anyway, $500 billion in taxes plus $800 billion in social security would eventually be able to pay for the majority of it, although not at first considering people already on SS retired in expectation of recieving more than $10K a year, but it would be able to reach that considering we would we be prefunding the retirement.
Also, around $300 billion in medicaid could be dipped into, at least for those who are both working and also receiving the $10k because most of them would be coming out ahead even after buying private insurance. I don’t know what we’d do for families whose alternative health insurance would be over $800 a month, and I don’t know how many of them there would be.
In addition, there is Federal payments such as TANF. I found the numbers for this but don’t remember what the numbers were, so let’s say $100 billion. If you have another number to insert be my guest.
Then there is an indeterminate amount of state aid that could be reduced. I’m not about to look into all 50 states welfare programs.
So if we were to simply increase taxes to their historical averages, we could almost start this program (but remember, I do not think we should.)
I think it would be really good for the working poor but a pretty bad deal for the completely unemployed considering many of them are probably getting more than $10k in help.
It would also be fairly bad for those about to retire, even if you just reduce their retirement income by a little bit. Over all, in order to make the program balance, those between 50 and 60 would probably have to get a little less over their lifetime than before.
As you can see from there, even with eliminating all of the stuff you’re talking about and more, taxes have to still increase by 30%. And that’s while maintaining the current (unsustainable) level of budget deficits. That’s not feasible.
Our numbers are almost exactly the same. I said that we’d have to raise taxes by $500 billion and you said $600 billion. However, as I have noted multiple times in the thread already, we are currently at a low GDP to tax ratio in America versus what we have had in the past decades: around 3% difference which exactly equals to $500 billion.
If you’d read my posts you would have noticed that I said that if we were to raise taxes, I would prefer that they be used to lower the deficit.
Terr, you say 570 Billion for all sorts of social programs, can you break that down any more?
What exactly does that include? We spend a lot of money on Veterans Affairs, are you counting any of that?
We spend a fair amount on the DOJ. I think that might go down in a country with lowered poverty.
Same goes for individual states and their police costs.
I think some excise tax revenue would increase with more people able to have a car, buy gas, and maybe the revenue from the travel industry also go up.
I don’t think we’ve considered everything yet in the math.
I just took ALL the “welfare” spending - federal, state and local. Arguably, some of that spending will have to stay, but I am willing to overestimate to prove the point.
Saying that DOJ and police costs will go down is a huuuuge stretch, IMO. But even with that what will you save - $30-40B? (has to be a fraction of the total of $215B or so) That’s not even close to $600B.
Since prisoners aren’t generating income, using the minimum income for their expenses is just an accounting trick, either way it’s coming out of tax revenue paid by non-prisoners.