The actual cost of UBI is not simply the annual amount multiplied by the number of recipients, just like the actual cost of buying a $20 bill for $20 is not $20, but $0. The actual cost requires calculating the net amount transferred from top earners to middle and low income earners, and that calculation also requires taking into account the welfare reform and tax reform that UBI allows through by the replacement of various programs and tax credits with UBI. In the end, the real cost of UBI is somewhere around $300-$600 billion.
The net cost is lower BUT the government has to raise and redistribute 3.2 trillion, either by
Taxation — Raising taxes steeply across the board. Disincentivizing productivity and penalizing the productive.
Printing money— A lot of it! That causes inflammation raising the cost of living and you get into this perpetual game of having to raise the universal basic income to catch up with cost of living.
Another factor that these optimistic analysis ignore. The same political faction that wants UBI also wants limitless, unfiltered immigration.
Whenever the democrats or leftists get in power our borders become none-existent.
Illegal immigration is encourage instead of penalized.
Chain migration, birthright citizenship or the idiotic lottery migration flood our country with low quality migrants.
Liberals refuse to filter for migration based upon clear heuristics that indicate that certain migrants would integrate better and contribute more to our country; like education, IQ, professional skills, income, net worth, cultural compatibility, or language skills — No ingles, no problemo! UBI para todos!
We won’t just be paying $12k to every American adult, we’ll be paying $12k to every single adult human who likesfree moneycapable of reaching to our borders, which is potentially billions of people. And we’ll be offering them a tremendous bribe of $12k/year to pack up their lives and come take advantage of our idiotically generous system.
Over the last 10 years of teaching university students about Rawls' vs Nozick's views on how to structure society, I've been thinking a similar thing. Even if you come down on the libertarian-minimal government-Nozick side (and a lot of people here do), this is an idea that makes sense.
Basic income might not be cheaper than doing nothing in the short term. But it will be cheaper than inaction if problems are allowed to get out of hand. I bet King Louis XVI wished he'd instituted a UBI!
Seriously, basic income also ensures that choices are truly voluntary as it reduces economic duress.
And ensuring that consumers have the ability to truly make those choices is obviously the best way to promote a competitive market. Competition is reliant on the consumers having options.
That should be a natural progression of the right-wing free-market thoughts. It's unfortunate that too many people are stuck in the 'how I wish to live my life' rather than realizing the contradiction in their personal ideology and following where that train of thought would lead towards. :/
just droppin by to say I love your work - one of these days I will break out of this shit poverty (and it wont be because I waited for this f***ed up govt to fix it) Crypto will save us - and this is an awesome platform to do it
I do believe a number of broken and corrupt social paradigms can be fixed through the innovation of blockchain technology. I just wonder, how quickly will this take place? Will it be years or generations before we cure these societal ailments?
See: ”examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? ” it looks like you got that one backwards. Should be "an ounce of prevention".
“Can we really afford a world without basic income?”
nope.
Steemit is an embryonic experiment which might give some insight in how to provide UBI without resorting to taxes.
Let that sink in for a moment.
What if a country were to implement a fork of the Steemit BlockChain providing all of their citizens the opportunity to earn rewards?
Maybe with each person having only one account, some form of universal basic income automatically distributed, each person having equal or close to equal voting power/weight, etc, that could work much better.
Right now, we have a system where whales cannot be voted out of office and they control the supply. Bots also pool money to exploit the system and benefit from it, without really adding much value to the system.
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What is the UBI response to loafers? Spendthrifts? While I worked in the military I saw a lot of people who spent more than their means, and ended up with huge debt. It wasn't that their pay was too low; it is that their desire is always too high. Some people are going to live in the now no matter how much money they get.
The response with UBI is that a much broader base of people can create social capital to help out this rather small fraction of the population, a fraction of the population that gets even less support today, by the way.
A basic income is something for the 99.9% of people who'd put it to better use than targeted benefits, I think that's a good objective to act upon in its own right.
edit: Also, a basic income wouldn't have to be a replacement for when there's clearly a greater requirement for more financial or service support like with the severly sick or elderly.
With respect (and I'm passionate about this topic), history shows that giving people free stuff does not create an even improvement across the population. Some people will use their UBI well; they will grow in wealth and contribute in the way UBI advocates expect.
But far more than .1% will waste their money. Where does the 99.9% assumption of frugality come from? The US is incredibly wealthy; I live in a country where people have every opportunity to get off the streets if they want to, and yet there are still people who are consistently broke and poor. And some, not all of those people, (and not .1%) are poor because of their own actions.
Look at ancient Rome's bread and circuses. What did the young roving mobs of men do who had free food? They brutalized others out of boredom.
Survival is a good tool for personal transformation. I'm supportive of helping those who cannot help themselves, but giving free stuff to the able bodied (especially youth) is a level of foolish that only Silicon Valley could think is a good idea.
Focus the money on widows and orphans, and maybe the mentally ill. Everyone else works.
Looks like I'm not the only one who's been reading the book "Utopia for realists". My view of just how viable a UBI is has been rapidly changing, in fact I can think of few opinions I've had that have flipped this quickly. I can't wait for wide-scale trials.
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This is incorrect.
The net cost is lower BUT the government has to raise and redistribute 3.2 trillion, either by
Another factor that these optimistic analysis ignore. The same political faction that wants UBI also wants limitless, unfiltered immigration.
We won’t just be paying $12k to every American adult, we’ll be paying $12k to every single adult human who likes free money capable of reaching to our borders, which is potentially billions of people. And we’ll be offering them a tremendous bribe of $12k/year to pack up their lives and come take advantage of our idiotically generous system.
Exactly. Incentives matter. UBI would absolutely crush any nation that implemented it if it had open borders.
Over the last 10 years of teaching university students about Rawls' vs Nozick's views on how to structure society, I've been thinking a similar thing. Even if you come down on the libertarian-minimal government-Nozick side (and a lot of people here do), this is an idea that makes sense.
Basic income might not be cheaper than doing nothing in the short term. But it will be cheaper than inaction if problems are allowed to get out of hand. I bet King Louis XVI wished he'd instituted a UBI!
Seriously, basic income also ensures that choices are truly voluntary as it reduces economic duress.
And ensuring that consumers have the ability to truly make those choices is obviously the best way to promote a competitive market. Competition is reliant on the consumers having options.
That should be a natural progression of the right-wing free-market thoughts. It's unfortunate that too many people are stuck in the 'how I wish to live my life' rather than realizing the contradiction in their personal ideology and following where that train of thought would lead towards. :/
Preach it brother, varoufakis is on board with this as well.
Great to see you again my friend, and with another amazing article
just droppin by to say I love your work - one of these days I will break out of this shit poverty (and it wont be because I waited for this f***ed up govt to fix it) Crypto will save us - and this is an awesome platform to do it
You make some very compelling points here. I examined the topic of cryptocurrency as a sort of vaccine against the cancer of debt in this article:
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@xsid/if-debt-is-a-cancer-is-cryptocurrency-the-cure
I do believe a number of broken and corrupt social paradigms can be fixed through the innovation of blockchain technology. I just wonder, how quickly will this take place? Will it be years or generations before we cure these societal ailments?
See: ”examples of those costly pounds that we currently consider normal that we could just instead eradicate with an ounce of cure? ” it looks like you got that one backwards. Should be "an ounce of prevention".
“Can we really afford a world without basic income?”
nope.
Steemit is an embryonic experiment which might give some insight in how to provide UBI without resorting to taxes.
Let that sink in for a moment.
What if a country were to implement a fork of the Steemit BlockChain providing all of their citizens the opportunity to earn rewards?
Maybe with each person having only one account, some form of universal basic income automatically distributed, each person having equal or close to equal voting power/weight, etc, that could work much better.
Right now, we have a system where whales cannot be voted out of office and they control the supply. Bots also pool money to exploit the system and benefit from it, without really adding much value to the system.
guess you didn't hear about steem-chat where the whale running it got booted out?
Nope, but that's interesting! I'll check. :)
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The 1% is in the process of squashing other classes thru the false ideology of capital accumulation.
As always great post with useful information. Thanks.
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What is the UBI response to loafers? Spendthrifts? While I worked in the military I saw a lot of people who spent more than their means, and ended up with huge debt. It wasn't that their pay was too low; it is that their desire is always too high. Some people are going to live in the now no matter how much money they get.
The response with UBI is that a much broader base of people can create social capital to help out this rather small fraction of the population, a fraction of the population that gets even less support today, by the way.
A basic income is something for the 99.9% of people who'd put it to better use than targeted benefits, I think that's a good objective to act upon in its own right.
edit: Also, a basic income wouldn't have to be a replacement for when there's clearly a greater requirement for more financial or service support like with the severly sick or elderly.
With respect (and I'm passionate about this topic), history shows that giving people free stuff does not create an even improvement across the population. Some people will use their UBI well; they will grow in wealth and contribute in the way UBI advocates expect.
But far more than .1% will waste their money. Where does the 99.9% assumption of frugality come from? The US is incredibly wealthy; I live in a country where people have every opportunity to get off the streets if they want to, and yet there are still people who are consistently broke and poor. And some, not all of those people, (and not .1%) are poor because of their own actions.
Look at ancient Rome's bread and circuses. What did the young roving mobs of men do who had free food? They brutalized others out of boredom.
Survival is a good tool for personal transformation. I'm supportive of helping those who cannot help themselves, but giving free stuff to the able bodied (especially youth) is a level of foolish that only Silicon Valley could think is a good idea.
Focus the money on widows and orphans, and maybe the mentally ill. Everyone else works.
Looks like I'm not the only one who's been reading the book "Utopia for realists". My view of just how viable a UBI is has been rapidly changing, in fact I can think of few opinions I've had that have flipped this quickly. I can't wait for wide-scale trials.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by scottsantens from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
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