this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
1302 points (99.2% liked)
Microblog Memes
6360 readers
2728 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They've been trying it across the world, it's called Universal Basic Income. It's been proven mostly successful every time.
Here's an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
Yeah! I wanted to specifically call out the study on UBI with formerly incarcerated people.
I know a lot of pushback on UBI is that it will make people lazy, or emboldened criminals. It has the exact opposite effect.
I believe that's manufactured pushback tbh. People who are overworked might think it would make themselves lazy. At first, maybe? To get your thoughts in order, it might look lazy. But most people who feel safe with a steady income want to be productive.
It's not "universal" unless/until it's given to everyone. Until then, it's just another targeted welfare program, "offered to a select portion of a city's population instead of all residents", as your link says.
You can't say UBI has been "proven mostly successful" without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire's net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can't), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I've seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn't even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
There are alternatives that would have a similar effect, without the scary price tag. A negative income tax is an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
The politics are easy, except that it needs a political champion who promises and delivers the redistribution of power that is UBI.
Technically UBI saves government money. That $2.4T is just transfers from net tax payers to net receivers. But because programs can be cut at that UBI level, It costs somewhere around $1200B (all government levels) less to provide $2.4T. Once you look at military budget as something that could increase your own cash, even more.
A fair tax system that eliminates payroll taxes and pays for universal healthcare can be 33%. Or 25% for first $100k income, and surtaxes at higher income levels.
https://www.naturalfinance.net/2019/06/andrew-yang-and-democrat-tax-proposals.html
I've had this discussion before. You might want to do some more research and have sources. I would advise you to look at really good sources about the following points:
Your numbers and projected income is way wonky. I'll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced.
I’m not the other person but I’ve had this discussion in work before and people have hit back with the following:
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
Now I’m in support of doing more for the average person and taking from corporations but I just don’t know how to argue against their, albeit lacking in actual data, arguments.
You may choose to have a $2000 cost of living, but you would choose that too through a pay raise. You could be empowered to keep $1000 cost of living, and there would be more apartments like "yours" if everyone else is moving up in lifestyle.
UBI gives you more choices. If you think everyone else is passive, just paying what they are told, you can use the opportunity to build more affordable life options for people, including easy access to loans from all of the extra money getting spent.
If sellers can fix prices so easily they're a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.
Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn't work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.
Now, if you'd picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.
I'd love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it's someone's perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.
It's the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.
I don't understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there's more demand? Then more jobs are created. It's a very vague question.
Apologies for being vague, it’s been a while since I’ve had this discussion.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding UBI as being linked to the cost of living, in that the UBI would provide for people’s basic needs and if they wanted more than that then they could find a job to supplement their income or maybe it’s one or the other.
I think what they were getting at ok the raising prices is that because there is more spending power then that means corps would like to get their hands on this extra money by raising prices.
I’ll try and broach this topic again and get their objections and bring it up next time I see this discussion.
No worries, I'm guessing they won't be able to respond either. It sounds like talking points they were given by a podcast or something, and they didn't really look into it. Whenever people start spouting those kind of things, digging deeper into their thoughts will usually tell you pretty quickly how much they believe or are repeating.
I don't understand this comment. Are you trolling or responding to the wrong one?
No, I'm pointing out that you've added so little to this you may as well have not even posted, look at how much traction the things the other person said are now getting. Why even say anything if you aren't willing to actually engage, all you've done is made the other person look rational and you look obtuse.
Interesting strategy!
Ahhh, the first one.
Yes, participate in a low stakes back and forths cause the ones with data and numbers are too scary, right?
I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:
Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you're left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.
The only thing 'wonky' is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.
P.S. Telling me to "look at really good sources" for 'it's not universal if it's not given to everyone' made me laugh pretty hard.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.? It makes no sense for it to be "universal," we should change the branding. Doesn't make it the bad idea you are so eager to paint it.
Taxes on the rich go way up, and so UBI is just a refundable tax credit, but some people pay more than they receive = taxation, where others receive more than they pay = negative taxation.
Negative income tax solves the "rich people getting 12k/yr they don't 'need'" issue. Beaurocracy/overhead has already been mentioned as another reason.
Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don't, will cost even more. That's one of the main upsides of UBI--no means testing makes it have practically no 'overhead'. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.