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Comment by ddeck | Hacker News Reader

Who did the calculation? I'd be keen to see the breakdown.

My rough estimates put the cost of JPY50k/month to the adult population at somewhere around USD 700 billion/year and JPY170k/month at USD2,400 billion, or around 47% of Japan's GDP. Total social security spending is currently in the order of USD300 billion.

Given that the Japan Government currently spends (excluding interest costs) around USD230 billion more than it earns in revenue each year, such a proposal would be extremely difficult to implement.

For reference, in 2014 the Japan Government has:

- Outstanding debt of ~USD12,100 billion

- Annual revenue of ~USD691 billion

- Annual spending of ~USD921 billion.

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The 50k JPY figure comes from the budget for social welfare in Japan. Here is an article where it is broken down for 2009: http://diamond.jp/articles/-/16672

But, let me try it with figures from 2011.[1]

107,495 billion JPY for total social welfare 32,463 billion JPY for national health insurance

The author deducted the amount spent for national health insurance from total social welfare.

That leaves: 75, 032 billion JPY

It should only be for the adult population, but I can't find numbers for just adults, so I divided by 120million.

625,266 JPY annually or 52105.5 JPY a month.

IIRC social insurance is not included in the general budget.

As far as the 170k JPY calculation, that was just my imagining what would be a reasonable basic income. I have never crunched the numbers on it.

But, it comes out to 2.04 million yen a year. Since the GDP per capita in Japan is 3.76 million JPY, this would be quite the redistribution of wealth.

[1] http://www.ipss.go.jp/ss-cost/j/fsss-h23/h23.pdf

Thanks for the link, it's an interesting report.

Indeed, the social insurance premiums/expenditures are not included in govt. revenue/expenditure figures, thus the disconnect.

It's worth noting that ~25% (JPY29,040 billion - JPY20k per month per capita) of the funding for those programs comes from employer contributions for their employees.

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