- A Seattle basic income pilot gave low-income residents $500 a month, nearly doubling employment rates.
- Some participants reported getting new housing, while others saw their employment incomes rise.
- Basic income pilots nationwide have seen noteworthy success, despite conservative opposition.
Why just for low income people?
What do you consider low income and what do you think the cut off should be? Most people aren’t exactly in favor of giving rich people money so the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
I don’t mind if they get $500 a month but in exchange they need to actually pay their taxes.
Lol right? Sure IDGAF if Jeff Bezos gets $500 with everyone else as long as he pays his millions upon millions of taxes. $500 is a drop in the bucket of what he should be paying. Also Amazon the company should undoubtedly be paying way more taxes than it does (if it even does).
Most UBI models use exactly that model to save a lot of money on the program. They just tax it back from the rich people.
I don’t know the answer.
The universal part of Universal Basic Income has always had this sticking point with me. Will Gates, Bezos and Musk also receive UBI?
Yes, but only because it would cost more to exclude them. For no added cost we can just add it to their taxes so it comes out neutral.
Thanks. That makes sense. So you can so do the same tax trick with other levels of earning.
Yup. At the theoretical middle we’d just tax 50% of the UBI, and so on.
Absolutely they would. Everyone would.
Of course taxes would rise to cover it, so the average person would be absolutely no better off than they are now.
In return the really poor get some breathing room, and we can kill all the “money grabbing dolescum” discourse around claiming benefits. People with low outgoings who just want a break from the treadmill can take it.
That’s actually incredibly optimistic, imo.
$500 a month is $6000 a year.
If we gave that amount of UBI to all working age Americans (rounded down for easy math, numbers 200 million), that’s a price tag of $1.2 trillion, every year.
That’s slightly more than the amount the US spends on welfare programs annually. The entire federal budget is about $6.2 trillion, so this would mean an increase of almost 20%. Where could we possibly get that much more tax revenue?
You’re getting half that back every year. You forgot that part. So it only cost 600 million a year. In fact that means we could kick it to a thousand a month and still be close to our current welfare budget. Find the number that matches exactly, (something like 928) and we can match our current spending while giving poor Americans ~$11,000 a year.
And the government smaller thing actually works here too. You’d think the conservatives would love this! Unless, it’s actually about hurting people isn’t it? Was smaller government just code for hurting people?
Depends on implementation but just paying it out to everyone is the easiest option. You can even make a progressive tax system that’s nothing but UBI + flat tax, ridiculously easy to administer. If the UBI was, say, 1k and the tax rate 50% (just to have easy numbers) if you earn 100 bucks a month you end up with 1050, if you earn 2000 you end up with 2k, and if you earn 1m you end up with 501000: Under 2k income the effective tax rate is negative, at 2k it’s exactly zero, at just over 2k it’s very low, over that it approaches 50% in the limit. Much cheaper and easier to just give it to everyone than means-test a gazillion low-income people just to spite Gates.