this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Give artists a basic universal income, and I guarantee every single person on earth will suddenly discover their "inner Picasso" to qualify.
The biggest issue with UBI is that it will never work, the math just doesn't add up.
I like the idea of a "Citizen's Dividend" funded from taxes on pollution, carbon Emmissions, etc. We can throw a wealth tax for billionaires in there too.
Taxes on pollution, carbon emissions etc. would raise the costs of living and would therefore mean that the UBI would need to be higher to accommodate for the higher costs. Which means that a huge part of these taxes would be payed in proxy by the government. Rendering it useless as a method to fund the UBI.
The costs for a UBI are just so enormous, and all on the shoulders of the working class, because those are the majority of tax payers.
If you have a million people, old, young, in between, and a working rate of 60% (because the other 40% are too old or too young or can't/doesn' t want to work) and pay everyone 1000$ as UBI. That would mean that a billion dollars has to be payed by 600.000 people, so every working citizen has to pay 1667$ to receive 1000$ in return. This means that working people don't get a UBI because they have to pay more then they get.
And those 1667$ taxes would only be for the UBI, meaning that the taxes would be much higher to pay for all the other costs that the state has.
This is a vast oversimplification. A UBI could replace a vast amount of existing welfare programs in a much more efficient way which would have a fraction of the overhead. There are tons of other proposals to fund a UBI such as a negative interest rate. Likely there would be many sources of funding, including money which now goes to existing wasteful welfare spending.
Ok, negativ interest rate sounds interesting and maybe doable. It is something I have to read more about, I see a few issues but have not enough information yet.