Political Memes

I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit,

Wouldn't be hard to do. Imagine we're talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let's also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.

258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That's the amount you'd need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it's something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it's a big amount of revenue to generate from...somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn't really sustainable.

I stopped reading at the obvious "I crunched the numbers" bullshit

??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.

The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn't be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn't working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.

The point is that if it's that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it's not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.

There's a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you've seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.

Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying "no matter how strong you are, you simply can't hit the moon with a thrown rock" with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they're full of shit and "lying like a snake" because they didn't talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that's impossible.

I know my example is simplistic; that's the fucking point, lmao. You're mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol