Comment by throwaway8184

To make this proposal make sense, we need to rephrase it in financial terms that Sam and HN readers would understand.

GDP is a revenue number. Roughly speaking, it's the aggregate sales of all American businesses. Or the aggregate spending of all American consumers.

Obviously there's no sense in which you can "own" a share of revenue. You own capital, not revenue.

So a workable translation of this idea into financial reality might be: every public company dilutes itself by 20%; the new shares are assigned to the government; the new shares are distributed to all Americans. Not unlike the voucher side of the Russian post-Communist privatization scheme.

Then the fun begins. Do the recipients actually own these shares? For instance, can they sell them? In theory, shares should produce dividends, but our tax system has made dividend distribution mostly a thing of the past. Profits are more likely to go through buybacks. You earn returns from capital by selling shares.

But if people can just sell the shares, what stops them from selling them all, and ending up right back where we started? A study of low-income lottery winners and their financial behavior would add a lot, I think, to our understanding of this and similar UBI schemes.