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Comment by jkepler | Hacker News Reader

2nd paragraph of the article states, "Employment insecurity and the rising cost of living are also taking a toll and expanding the profile of those at risk of homelessness. "

Yet, UBI would drive prices up more, as its simple monetary creation. Rising costs are part of the problem, let's not use UBI to make them rise faster.

(Unless of course one were to simultaneously destroy the same amount if money as the UBI from someone else's savings. But that amounts to theft---unmasking the real morality of UBI. And I've never heard UBI proponents argue that we should steal from the rich to fund it.)

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What? Have you not heard of progessive income taxes?

If you're in the US, medicaid, food stamps... your comment makes no sense if your only complaint is UBI.

I don’t understand why this isn’t obvious? Are people blinded by the idea of either charity or receiving handouts that they ignore what _inflating_ the currency supply has just recently done to prices?

We should take money from the rich to fund it.

I would not say steal because I do not consider taxation to be stealing.

We absolutely should not increase the money suply

Say UBI is $10k a year. In the US that would add about $4T to required tax revenue. That’s double what’s currently collected each year. That wouldn’t even be enough to qualify as basic.

UBI would replace other programs, like social security and food stamps so it's not as bad as you make it out. Also you can use the tax code to claw back some or all of that UBI from higher income individuals, again lowering the total necessary revenue.

>UBI would replace other programs, like social security and food stamps

So UBI will take money away from the poor and the elderly? Median Social Security is already $15K based on numbers a few years old and will inevitably be higher with inflationary effects 2021-2022.

And that's not including Medicare, which is another huge program that targets the elderly.

In fact, something like 45% of Federal spending is targeted at the retired (who only represent something like 15% of the population).

You can't fund UBI by having it replace other programs without asking people already benefiting from those programs to take gigantic haircuts.

No you will replace what they get in social security, food stamps etc. with UBI.

That just means "UBI for people who are not already old, infirm or poor [call it the top four quintiles of income for the working age population] will have to be funded from incremental taxation" ...

Well yes, obviously (although you can structure your tax scheme to target the quintiles you prefer). UBI is not about giving everybody free money, but providing a universal safety net and removing the absolute need for people to work to survive.

If it where me designing UBI, effectively only people in the bottom 2 quintiles would get to keep 100% of their UBI after tax, and people in the top would get to keep 0% of their UBI after tax.

So let's just assume that (generously) the cost here is really just "give the second income quintile an additional $1,000 per month"; on the rough-and-ready basis that most transfers are currently going to be the first income quintile and that UBI offsets those.

~260M adults in the U.S. so ~52M in that group; for a cost of $624bn annually. Bear in mind, this is assuming no-one in the third or fourth quintiles get anything, which is much less generous than your proposal, and that $1,000 per month is at the low end of the range often proposed.

And let's say we're going to fund that by taxing the top 25% of tax payers. In 2019, last year with good data, the top 25% paid about $1.4tn of income taxes. So basically income taxes would have to increase by ~50% for that group.

But their taxes are still reduced with the UBI payment subtracted, so where does the extra revenue come from?

So not universal, then?

Universal in the sense that everybody who qualifies[0] gets it automatically deposited into their bank accounts every month without having to jump through hoops. People in the top 2 quintiles will however see have to see their taxes go by (at least) the amount that they get in UBI each year for there to be any chance of the numbers coming even close to making sense.

[0] Citizens (possibly permanent residents) over 18 (or 16?) who actually reside in the country.

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