Comment by olalonde
1 day ago
Not necessarily. The US government already spends >2000$ per adult per month. It would require a total rethinking of the role of government.
1 day ago
Not necessarily. The US government already spends >2000$ per adult per month. It would require a total rethinking of the role of government.
Spends on what? It's not like you can disband the military, not build roads and bridges and eliminate medicaid just because you send out a $1000/mo UBI payment.
If you want to consider just social assistance then the US government spends about $950B annually, and that works out to $2800 per year per citizen. To make it a livable amount you'd have to at minimum 5x that expenditure (and a lot more than that in urban areas).
If someone is saving money to make a downpayment on a house, they don't stop spending money on food. They will likely eat out less, buy less expensive foods, watch for sales, cut down on food waste, or find other means to reallocate some of their budget for food to savings for that downpayment. Yet they will not stop eating.
I'm not the type of person who blindly supports UBI. I think that it would be disasterous to implement it without rethinking how the economy should work and how UBI is going to address social woes. That said, I do think that it will be necessary in the long run. Money, may it be earned or granted, is a tool for people to make decisions. Traditional social programs pretty much does the opposite. It removes autonomy. It removes accountability. It doesn't much matter whether it is social housing (something physical) or conditional grants of money (which is a major focus of this article).
The comment I was replying to proposed a UBI of $13,000/year or roughly what many people on disability currently live on. That would cost around $3.4 trillion annually, leaving over $3 trillion for everything else, including roads and the military. Of course, you'd still need to make cuts somewhere - likely from existing entitlement programs.
I just posted the number that entitlement programs currently use, and it is under $1T. So you're basically saying "it's easy to implement UBI, we just need an extra 2.4T/yr lying around somewhere" (which is equivalent to 1/3 our total budget). Scale it up to realistic numbers (no one is surviving on just $13K/yr, plenty of people need more than just average support e.g. for medical conditions) and you're easily talking $5T+.
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> and a lot more than that in urban areas
Or, if the UBI is insufficient, you could work or move someplace less expensive.
Most anything else would feel unfair (as a result of being so) and tend to drive a cycle of inflation in the expensive urban areas rather than working against it.