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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Raising taxes is the best way of financing UBI. Eliminating some transfer programs will help, but eliminating all of them (like Medicare) will cause significant pain and suffering.

Most sane UBI proposals have taxes going up just enough so that taxes on the middle class go up enough to offset the UBI; resulting in no net benefit or cost to the middle class.

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To pay all adults in the US (240 million) a UBI of $13,000 would require $3.1 trillion. The entire US federal budget (which is still in deficit by $500 billion) is $3.8 trillion. That can't be made up just with a little bit of increased taxation.

If my taxes increase by $13,000 at the same time as the government gives me a cheque for $13,000, I'm not going to care, I'm just happy knowing that $13,000 is coming in regularly no matter what happens to my job. So the only people with an effective tax increase are the rich, and for a lot less than $3.1 trillion.

Okay, but if you are, on net, not paying in more to the system than you're getting, then someone is going to have to pay that difference. You cannot maintain all those social programs, and a UBI, without those very large tax increases to pay for those who are net UBI consumers.

Certainly. If you work the numbers, you'll find that you can get a workable UBI with hundreds of billions in benefit reductions and hundreds of billions in non-offset tax increases.

Really big numbers, but not crazy unworkable big.

A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there; pretty soon you're talking real money.

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