Yep, but this is America so we need it to have a catchy name.
The PATRIOT Act, the FREEDOM Act, and now the Freedom Dividend. At least it isn't an acronym I guess.
If any country could afford to do some sort of universal basic income, the US is probably the most likely. IIRC, the existing health care system in the US costs more as a percentage of government spending than other countries with forms of universal coverage.
Given how much the US spends on healthcare already, and how bloated the system is. It would probably be cheaper actually to just cut everyone a check to cover basic living expenses and then cutting the tax-exclusion for companies providing healthcare to employees (although I don't know how likely that is) because they won't need it anymore.
American Health Care
The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, and a large share of that spending comes from the federal government.
In 2017, the United States spent about $3.5 trillion, or 18 percent of GDP, on health expenditures – more than twice the average among developed countries.
UBI but with a cute name? cool
An extra $12,000 a year would tremendously help me get my life together. It would be akin to winning the lottery.
I'm all for this, but with how loud and angry the GOP people are, even though they aren't a majority, will vote against it because something something commmunism/liberals/anything else.
I don't even get 1,000 a month with SSI and income.
Yang’s plan is a bit different, however. He intends to pay for it with a value-added tax, a consumption tax levied on goods at each stage of their production. “The big trap that America is in right now is that as artificial intelligence and autonomous cars and trucks take off, we’re going to see more and more work disappear and we’re not going to have new revenue to account for it,” he said. “The big winners are going to be the biggest tech companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook who are great at not paying a lot of taxes. So the way we pay for a universal basic income is by passing a value added tax which would get the American public a slice of every Amazon transaction and Google search.”
It’s going to have to be a very meaty VAT, because Australia’s 10% GST would be insufficient to fund a UBI scheme. European countries have higher rate VATs, but they also have narrower bases (more exclusions to the VAT).
And then you run into the problem that VATs disproportionally disadvantage the poor, who spend higher proportions of their earnings, and therefore pay more VAT as a proportion of their income l. And ultimately I don’t believe the scheme would work whatsoever, because the UBI would be funded not by the wealthy, but by the people receiving the UBI. That’s not sustainable.
Yeah, 1k a month could easily be a home payment for me.
Some proponents of UBI and leftist theory essentially believe that there's not really any barrier to this sort of policy.
Modern Monetary Theory
Just to put this into context: Australia’s 10% GST raises $60 billion per year. Australia has a population of around 25 million, but even if you use a conservative UBI recepient number of 12.5 million (eg 12.5 million eligible adults, and the rest are children), that is GST per capita of $4,800 per person. But this bloke wants to offer adults $12,000 per year.
With all else equal, and assuming every cent of the VAT only went to UBI payments, that means the VAT would need to be 25%. That’s a 25% consumption tax whenever you buy video games, stationery, take-away etc. That would be an enormous drag on the economy, and it would mean that you, as a UBI recipient, would be paying substantially more than otherwise.
Maybe instead of a fixed $1,000 sum, he should make it more fluid fixed to a percentage of revenue made.
Basically, get the tax money first then disperse it evenly among the populace instead of promising the populace a fixed sum and then looking where to get the money.
Even if we all got $500 a month instead, it would at least be tremendously helpful to me personally.
I'm impressed. He may be the only candidate who's thinking ahead responsibly.
or me it'd be the difference between bouncing off the poverty line and actually being able to live.
It probably would not be as helpful as you think. Even going by that idea, and assuming it would be a 10% VAT with a similar tax base to Australia’s GST, that’s only $400 per month in UBI, using my calculations above. But then your spending would increase. Eg I just spent $100 on my weekly shopping of which ~$5 was GST. I also spend $80 per week on car fuel, of which ~$7 is GST. That’s almost $50 per month just from those two sources of expenditure - or 12.5% of that UBI.
All the while risking a recession. Point is, if this bloke is serious about UBI, don’t have the poor finance it. It’s as idiotic of an idea as the method in which Social Security in the US is financed - effectively a Ponzi scheme.
Well personally I'm saving as much money as I can to find a home of my own, but I understand that generally people would spend more.
But would that not help economic growth to an extent, especially if it's spent on items not under the tax?
Fuck dude I'd suck a dick a month for an extra 20 bucks
I still do not agree with UBI personally. I'd prefer a system which was based around helping people find better employment options, and subsidizing moving costs if needs be.
The net effect on the economy would be negative, keeping in mind that the UBI would be funded by a consumption tax. Consumption taxes, like most other taxes (the notable exception is land taxes), are necessarily a drag on the economy, as they take cash out of circulation within the economy.
The cash would be returned in the form of UBI payments, yes, but not all of it would go back to stimulating the economy - everyone has a marginal propensity to save, especially people receiving the universal basic income who don’t really need it. So quite a lot of the UBI payments would be sitting unproductively in bank accounts. The net effect of this is more cash outflows from the economy than cash inflows - recession ahoy.
When I was growing up, I was told there was a system for that already. It was called,
"Go to college. Ignore the fine print on debt for a few years."
Can't we just raise minimum wage? Why should government be subsidizing wages like this in the first place?
Raising the minimum wage too drastically will result in job loss.
There is already a growing trend of employers firing a full time employee and replacing them with a part time employee to avoid paying for healthcare costs.
Because the minimum wage continues to remain being 'not minimum enough to live on'. If we say 'this is the floor, this is the least you can get paid for labor depending on how skilled your labor is' and then proceed to remove the bottom 20% of that market, then we have 20% of that market suddenly unable to pay for rent -- and then you have massive unemployment, homelessness, crime... at that point minimum wage is useless.
A 'minimum wage' means nothing to workers who have no access to markets which would allow them work in them for money. Imagine a world in which you must spend $100k to obtain sufficient training/education to find a job, assuming you have no apprenticeships or trade-school programs nearby. Who pays that $100k? How do you get it? If you must go into significant, heavy, life-shattering debt for an uncertain amount of time in exchange for an uncertain job, is that not a step towards the medieval sort of work force? What happens to those who can't pay those debts and yet can't find jobs to pay those debts? Debtor's prisons?
All sorts of things break down when unskilled labor is suddenly something people 'can't depend on to exist' as a bottom floor for the market in case your expertise/skill/field goes belly-up. Imagine if all the checkouts in the US are self-checkout; all the fast food joints run by machine check-out-clerks and maybe a human cook or two in the back if it's something that would be annoying to machine/build/code; all the truck driving jobs are automated; all taxis are automated... where, exactly, would you go if you suddenly were out a job and nobody would hire you in the field you're presently in?
That's the thing that UBI attempts to solve: the rapidly-approaching problem of there no longer being a 'dependable source of income' in the United States that comes in the form of a job. You can't pull yourself up 'by the bootstraps' when bootstraps cease to exist - so you need someone to loan them to you. The alternative would be the serf/lord model where you either get 'patron'd' by some wealthy person of means to become skilled in exchange for you providing them money and labor in the meanwhile and afterwards - or you get 'sold' to a person/group in such a way that your education is paid-for and your accommodations/food/clothes are provided but in exchange your wages are heavily garnished to the point that regaining your independence may be exceedingly difficult.
Should we raise the minimum wage? Absolutely. What should it be raised to? $15/hour (depending on location). Why should it be raised to that? Because that's what it takes to live comfortably. Why should the minimum wage be set to 'what it takes to live comfortably'? Because we're fucking Americans and should be leading the world rather than whimpering about things being 'too hard to do'.
Our society perception of college as job training is the entire reason we are so fucked up.
If we want to get jobs, there are trade schools for that with programs focused on the most popular and fastest growing professions. College is suppose to be a life experience that improves you, you can take what you learn and apply it to every aspect of life and not just the workforce.
Sure, you can learn about finances, pre-medicine biology, or Computer Science, but you also take courses in soft skills and humanities as well to balance it out. People expect jobs to be thrown at their faces when they get their degree and that's why we have so many undergrads working dead end jobs.
Still cheaper than the wall
For now. While those trade schools aren't flooded by tens-of-millions-of-persons-workforce industries. There simply aren't enough of them and they aren't accessible enough to train that large of a workforce fast enough to not cause absolutely incredible disruptions to the economy.
And I absolutely agree, we have no other option while we try to establish a more efficient system or even spend an entire generation destroying the stigma associated with vocational training.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. The other option would be, of course, for the government to start saying 'we will pay you to go, right now, to a trade school and pick up a skill that's unlikely to be machinated' -- but that requires the government to own up to the possibility that such a thing could happen. Presently, said government is refusing to accept that climate change exists in a form other than observed local weather.
We could prevent the mass disruption by getting ahead of it and starting to get people trained now but of course we won't because 'the economy's doing great' and 'it's ridiculous to suggest that machines are going to cause massive disruptions to the economy'.
This is actually not true in my whole region.
In my county, the local trade school became a specialized high school where students in the county can go to instead of their local HS. Because of this, it is heavily focused on educating students there as oppose to any adult applicants.
In fact, the number of fields adults can apply to is reduced to only a handful compared to what students that enter at the age of 14 can learn.
And I can't apply to any other county's trade schools because either they have gone the same High School route, or the fees for "out of county students" is so enormous that it's not economically feasible. And in the rare case that they just don't have the right courses.
Trade schools are shit if you're well past your teenage years or early 20s. I know this because I thought it would be a way out of my shitty economic condition.
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