I don't see how a universal basic income could be sustainable in any way.
You either have debt hyperinflation, or you have taxes high enough that the universal basic income is meaningless.
You either have debt hyperinflation, or you have taxes high enough that the universal basic income is meaningless.
Not true. You should read the UBI policy proposal that Yang created for his POTUS run. You can find them here:
- https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/ - https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/
I think a well-designed UBI could work. The tricky part is that UBI is one of those experiments that has to be done on the large, and pulling back if it doesn't work out is challenging. Any errors in implementation and design are potentially very expensive.
[1] https://theweek.com/articles/858097/andrew-yangs-ubi-problem
It's better just to have income and wealth taxes.
no it doesnt. the US consumes a lot, but you are mistaking an accounting identity with something causal. if people decided to consume less, that means they are putting off current consumption for future consumption and saving those resources for investment to allow that to happen. don't worry - they'll consume at some point when they feel it is in their best interest (and if they don't, they basically just gave us a bunch of free labor).
all economies everywhere are driven by production. human desire is pretty much endless - you rarely have to incentive consumption. when people have the resource (ie, they produced), they will naturally consume.
the only way that long term standards of living improve is by increasing productivity (this is something virtually every economist agrees to). that is done by increasing capital stocks, machinery, technology. those are all production oriented activity.
I agree that it may discourage consumption. It’s not clear to me that this is fundamentally a bad thing, at least in terms of conspicuous consumerism
When the people at the top make less money, they invest less money into new toilet paper R&D and new factories. When the people at the bottom make less money, they spend less on toilet paper, and the people at the top make less money. The balance is fragile, and if your end goal is that your citizens have access to the finest and most luxurious bathroom experience they can, then you must take care to balance the engine of capital with great precision.
This (and its inverse, "when the people at the top make more money, they invest it so it does good for the whole economy") is the foundation of trickle-down economics.
It's been empirically proven not to work over the past 40 years.
If you had a dial labelled "wealth redistribution percentage", trickle-down economics says you that if you move it towards "0%" everything will get better. What I am saying is that if you start moving it towards "100%", everything will get better, but if you keep moving it for a long time, everything will get worse again. It is not clear to me that this has been empirically proven to be false.
But the main point is 99% of people are already spending more than $1000 a month to survive, so we can afford it without spending more. It's just about how the books are balanced.
For high earners it means $1000+ in taxes. For the poorest it replaces conditional welfare.