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RE: The Moral Question of Using Unconditional Basic Income to Refuse Employment
Providing $12,000 annually to every citizen over 18 will require almost doubling federal expenditures. Where does that money come from?
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_19_04_02_henderson.pdf
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-11/flaws-basic-income-everyone
https://www.mises.ca/against-the-libertarian-case-for-a-basic-income/
That is an incorrect calculation, and I'd appreciate it if you'd read this to understand why:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/the-cost-of-universal-basic-income-might-be-lower-than-you-think
As for how I'd go about funding it, this is how I'd prefer we do it in the US:
https://medium.com/economicsecproj/how-to-reform-welfare-and-taxes-to-provide-every-american-citizen-with-a-basic-income-bc67d3f4c2b8
So you assert there will be no cost associated with the bureaucracy managing this gigantic program? You assert there will be no change in behavior on the part of the wealthy who will be paying the enormous amounts of money given to the poor? You assert that there will still be some sort of social security program and payments, so that means the revenue streams for SS will not be made available to the UBI program. No, your math example is wrong. The analysis in the article I posted is correct. Distributing those payments to that many people will require all that taxation, all that increase to federal spending and posting some silly example based on 5 people voluntarily hsaring a pittance among themselves can't undo the analysis of the federal budget done by economists.
My math is correct. You just don't understand subtraction apparently. If I give you $20 and ask for $15 back, the cost to me to give you $20 is $5, not $20.
Based on the costs of the Social Security Administration's overhead, we're talking about a 0.07% cost of administration.
As for a change of behavior of the wealthy, we're talking about a 10% increase in tax burdens on the top 10%. If you were earning $1 million per year, what kind of drastic behavioral change could we expect from you $600,000 after taxes instead of $700,000? Studies looking for optimal tax rates show that behavioral changes of the rich don't kick in till around 60-70% effective tax rates, not 40%. It's like you're worried about turning up the thermostat in your home out of fear your blood will reach the point of boiling.
Additionally, if you have such a problem with raising taxes on the owners of capital, to pay for the lost incomes of those whose jobs are replaced by capital itself in the form of hardware and software, what is your preferred solution to that economic reality? What is your answer to technological unemployment?
Also, don't bother claiming that economists don't like this idea. It has plenty of support among economists, including Nobel prize winners including both Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek in the 20th century, and a growing list this century.
Umm, you shouldn't poke at other people's math when you use an example like that. If you give me $20 and ask for $15 back then you haven't given me $20. The cost for you to give me $5 was $5. The other $15 was never transferred, except in the federal bureaucracy it would disappear forever into the government overhead and fraud.
You only prove my point. Yes, the cost in my example is $5 instead of $20, just like the cost of UBI is ~$500 billion instead of $3 trillion.
Regarding your claim that government would take all the money, that's just stupid. Government wastes all kinds of money on services that are inferior to giving cash, and so many programs and so much bureaucracy that could be eliminated with UBI.
No, you missed the point entirely. You want to make it seem that giving me $20 only cost $5, but I never got $20. The entire example was flawed and wrong. Try it with your mortgage company. Tell them to return all but $20 of your mortgage payment back to you. Then explain that they got the mortgage payment, but it only cost you $20 and so everybody comes out ahead.
Would you explain for all who are reading this exchange why you authored the piece above describing how you would go about funding UBI to a level of $3.8 trillion (copied from your article: Basic income revenue pool: $3.72 trillion) if the program will only cost ~$500 billion?
You didn't provide a preferred solution to the problem of technological unemployment. Or are you denying that it is even a problem?
Shrink government. Reduce government spending. Eliminate government programs and agencies. Open the free market to greater entrepreneurship with less regulation and intervention by government at all levels. Allow the creative genius of the people striving to create a better life for themselves and their families to pursue a million different solutions until the ones with the greatest success rate rise to the top and dominate the markets. The very last thing I would support or endorse is growing government. Allowing government to consume even more resources, dominate even more areas of human activity, control ever larger percentages of the mmarket and the economy is exactly the wrong solution. It doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is the majority of what is wrong with the world's economy today. More liberty, more freedom, more individuality, and less, much, much less government is the only hope for the future.
You didn't even address the question. What about technological unemployment?? You appear to be a bot with your inability across threads to address the posts you are responding to. It's just an never ending automated scripted reply about 'gubment evil, taxation bad, freedum good!'.
Ha ha, nice try. I did exactly address your question. Apparently you have no counter to present so instead you attempt to make it seem my response was somehow a swing and a miss.
You want to empower government, to grow it to twice its current size, at least. You want tyranny for the people, a government that controls their incomes. (You probably also want the government to run healthcare, too, and yet you claim you are not a socialist. HA!)
I want freedom, liberty, and a government that serves the people rather than controls them. If you cannot understand the nature of my response it says much more about your lack of understanding of liberty and the system of government we are supposed to enjoy than it does about my answer.
And your second article is all about adding $trillions in new taxes. Why would we need to add $trillions in taxes for a plan that doesn't require $trillions in new spending?
The funding avenues determine the net distributive outcome. Adding trillions in new taxes wouldn't matter in the least if they were matched with refunds of equivalent size. Of course, that would be pointless. What isn't pointless is reforming the tax code in a way that simplifies it, and lowers the effective tax burdens of 8 out of 10 households and increases the tax burden of 2 out of 10 households, which are currently the only ones benefiting in the American economy.
The overwhelming majority of the US has not seen their incomes increase since the 1970s, despite increasing productivity the entire time. This is because technology is only benefiting the top, at the cost of pushing down on everyone else. That's unsustainable, and a very bad idea.
If your taxes go up $4,000 to pay for basic income, and you receive $12,000 of basic income in return, you are $8,000 better off. You can also look at that as paying $8,000 less in taxes. It's a giant tax cut.
as history shows, tax and spend does not work... sorry, I regard UBI as another keneysian miracle that cannot become true.
Taxation is utterly coercive because it make people pay for things they do not want, such as war. And with world govs pouring billions into AI weaponry, it clearly tell us that taxation is lethal.
Eliminating means tested welfare and returning the tax levels on the wealthy to where they were between 1945 and 1979 when the USA had the largest middle class in history.
that time has long gone away... there is NO way back, unless one is a mormon or an amish
The tax rates you refer to were never actually paid, because the code had so many loopholes and exemptions and deductions nobody actually paid 91% taxes, or later 70% taxes. It just didn't happen. The period of time we had the largest middle class in the world was the result of a lot of things. The industrial revolution, the rarity of free markets in the world, domestic manufacturing, etc. Increasing tax rates doesn't magically bring back the glory days of times gone by.