Comment by paxys
21 hours ago
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+.
It wouldn't be very comfortable, but yes - it's possible to live on that amount. Many people on disability do so today. If it's not enough and you're unable to work, you'd have to rely on savings, family, or charity. And yes, the idea would for UBI to account for over 50% of current government spending and to get rid of most existing government programs (except core functions like military and law enforcement). That’s why I ended my original comment with "it would require a total rethinking of the role of government."
By the way, I think you're overlooking the strongest criticism of my UBI proposal: that it would reduce the incentive to work, potentially lowering labor participation and, in turn, government tax revenue, which could make the system unsustainable. It's hard to predict whether that would be a real problem or not.
Or we'd have to raise taxes by 2.4T dollars. Which isn't as extreme as it sounds, since we're at the same time giving everybody money. If 2/3 of the amount of UBI is paid for with increased taxes, the average taxpayer will come out ahead. "We're raising your taxes by $10,000" doesn't sound as bad as when accompanied by "and here's a cheque for $13,000". Bill Gates' taxes will go up a lot more than $13,000, but the average taxpayer will see a very small benefit.
The other benefit of raising taxes is that it will control inflation.
And $13K/year isn't enough to live on, yet many disabled people do just that. 4 people each getting $13K can probably live together on that. Living alone is a luxury.
And with UBI, there are no limitations on you supplementing your income on the side. One of the biggest criticisms of UBI is that everybody will stop working. If UBI is $13K/year pretty much only those who are unable to work will not supplement their income with work.
2 replies →
> no one is surviving on just $13K/yr
There are many countries around the world where that would be normal, or even a sign of affluence.
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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.