UBI Does Not Require Tax Rates of 40 to 60 Percent
scottsantens.com
scottsantens.com
Eg In Australia, there are 25M people. The annual cost of UBI per person would be around 30K (unemployment allowance) or 50K (Living wage)
This means between 750B and 1.25T in payments per year.
The current total welfare spend is approx 250B per year. Other spend is another 250B.
Funnily enough, revenue from income tax is roughly the same, around 220B.
So to pay for UBI from income taxes, would need a 300% to 500% increase across the board.
I cannot see how this happens without significant tax hikes or continuing the inflationary money printing approach.
I think UBI is a lot like "Helikoptergeld" (copter money) which you distribute to everyone instead of trying to get help (money) there where it's needed.
I would absolutely just follow my dreams if I get UBI, and that won't contribute to the GDP, but rather to society.
People will be paid to scrub the toilets. (The effect on wages would be interesting: unskilled but dead-end jobs would probably see substantial wage increases, while entry-level jobs with advancement potential might see decreases, at least relative to wages overall.)
No.
I mean, if everyone paid a flat capitation equal to their UBI payment, sure, but if “everyone pays” because it is paid for out of general funds raised by a tax system which, even if it is a mix of various taxes, is approximated as a progressive tax on income, then, no, not at all.
Depending on your country's economic mix, there's almost certainly a private industry that's predictably profitable and also sort of undislodgable (for example, oil, telecom, or railways). Obvious targets for state takeover; keep the prices the same and run the profits into the state coffers, or use the pricing as an additional lever for social objectives (i. e. pricing petrol to the moon to encourage EV takeup).
> Several contemporary political discussions are related to the basic income debate, including those regarding automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and the future of the necessity of work. A key issue in these debates is whether automation and AI will significantly reduce the number of available jobs and whether a basic income could help prevent or alleviate such problems by allowing everyone to benefit from a society's wealth, as well as whether a UBI could be a stepping stone to a resource-based or post-scarcity economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Basic_Income
As such, there's no reason to wait for a government to introduce it. UBI is already within economic and logistic reach, you just have to organize it. There are innumerably many ways to do that.
If you had enough capital, you could literally purchase a large tract of desert land and convert it into a modern self-sufficient town in a year or two. All the technology has already been invented, it's all off-the-shelf now.
Sure, if you say so.
Whether this is OK is a different question.
In other words it is a monetary illusion. The workers can’t be allowed to be any richer because there isn’t any extra production they can consume with that extra money.
Money supply is a flow, not a stock. There isn’t a fixed amount of money.
This is true exactly as much as it is true with “capitalism” in place of “UBI” (particularly if the UBI is, in the more direct sense, funded by taxes on capital.)
> Sure, if you say so.
Economics is a social science, not a hard science based on empirical evidence. Denying that there's an incentive for the ultra-wealthy (e.g., billionaires, corporations) to fund and promote specific ideologies is to deny reality; similar to denying that oil and gas companies influenced climate and environmental research or Purdue influences medical research and practices, in the pursuit of profit.
Social sciences are based on empirical evidence the same way hard sciences are; to the extent they are more problematic it is because they deal with complex and in part, chaotic systems where isolating effects is difficult (a problem shared, often, with life sciences), plus they frequently deal with issues about which political, religious, commercial, and/ir identity issues are tied up (this is true for subfields scattered across the rest of the sciences, but it is true of almost every subfield of the social sciences).
In a practical basis, this might result in many jobs generating very low salaries (since that can occur without quality-of-life compromise). Maybe we end up paying an unskilled telemarketer only $5,000 a year, but that's all "fun money" with his basic life expenses covered by the state.
In the long term, this could cause deflation, as a lot of "discretionary" products have to reprice to exist solely within the "fun money" budgets, rather than "we can charge $600 for a PS5 because plenty of people will skip meals to afford one."
You wouldn't: bottom-tier dead-end jobs would see wage increases, because they'd still be necessary, but no longer have an economically coerced labor supply; Jobs that have too marginal economic value to be viable in the current minimum-wage set up, but which provide useful experience and thus are not dead end jobs woild become viable, and because more people would be able to take time out of dead-end jobs to do education and training, competition for entry level jobs in fields with advancement would be greater, likely suppressing wages in those jobs.
This is a situation where your net tax is 50%, and marginal tax on work is still 100%.
Better yet, folks might not even need it anymore.