> provide coverage for $5000/year with a $10,000 deductible, instead of $10,000/year with no deductible.

that's the wrong way to think about it. The above makes an implicit assumption that by doing this you "save" $5000/yr because the insurance company is "more efficient".

That's wrong - you actually cost $5000 (this being the "profit" the insurance company makes if you _didn't_ need the medical treatment that year). Under the gov't version, if you were healthy, you're "free". You only cost when you actually need the medical treatment.

Healthcare should not be done under a private insurance model. Any profit made by the private insurer is a cost to providing medical treatment, and does not contribute to the outcome. By making medical treatment a tax payer funded scheme, the cost of an unhealthy society is spread out amongst all. Not only does this give the gov't buying pressure to lower the margins of all medical treatments, it also makes a policy pressure for gov't to give preventative measures for good health outcomes (like legislating low sugar foods, or incentivize exercise and good diet etc).

this whole school choice and insurance choice neoliberal mantra is what has gotten us into this mess to begin with. The entire insurance sector is a huge waste of manpower and essentially just huge dump for the surplus of white collar university graduates that have nowhere to go.

There's not a single person on the planet who derives benefits from navigating the trade-offs of byzantine insurance plans, and school choice is a good way to speed up social and racial segregation and enabling quasi fraudulent religious schools that teach people nonsense.

It's time we do away with this altar of choice. I moved from Germany to the UK years ago, and I've never enjoyed anything more than the NHS because I literally do not have to waste a minute of my life on health insurance any more. I pay X amount of taxes, I go to the doctor, I get treated, I go home.

You are misunderstanding me.

The government gives you $300 and makes sure that enough healthy food is available for those $300. You don't get $300 worth of food. You get money. Cold hard cash. And the option to buy cheap food from the government.

Companies can also make cheap food targeting those $300, and I'm sure there already exists non-government government cheese.

About education and healthcare. The government just needs to provide the bare minimum. Broke an arm? Goverment will cast it. Still crooked? Get in the wait line or go work for money and get an insurance or pay for the surgery. Want a better education for your kids? Homeschool if you can, or just work for more money and pay for one.

UBI should be:

survival -> socialism

good (material) life -> capitalism

Fun fact: government cheese actually used to be pretty good, because it was made and stored in a cave the government owned. It turns out that caves are pretty close to the ideal place to make cheeses, so the government’s stuff wasn’t bad!

Everything you say just isn't true in many places on Earth.

This feels like BS. Sorry! K12 is free. There should be no problem expanding to college and beyond. Also, see no reason to not have a good universal healthcare that is detached from your employer. These are smart ideas worth pursuing.

The cliche that total scientific socialism sounds great in theory but doesn't work in practice actually applies far better to laissez-faire capitalism (scientific socialism doesn't even look good on paper). Your arguments against free education and universal healthcare sound clever apriori, but they are completely at odds with the evidence. Countries with universal healthcare and robust public school systems invariably have better outcomes on both fronts.

One of the problems with UBI on a small scale in the US is that it’s difficult to study the macroeconomic effects that people are so worried about. The studies on direct cash assistance in terms of social science are rather strong evidence in favor of what left leaning proponents claim. The reservations typically come from the American right which is more of a Social Darwinist party these days than a conservative one, which is closer to the Reagan Republican era GOP.

We probably need tens of billions of dollars to pilot UBI properly in the US across borders and to help setup the infrastructure to distribute the funds. But compared to another missile program, the social good of such a program is undeniable. Which is probably why it’ll be rejected in today’s hell world US politics.

Even if it works brilliantly in other places, you'll still have a big part of the US saying "it'll never work here, we're too different" etc. Same arguments as the metric system that's been great everywhere for such a long time.

One (edit: another) problem with that thinking is that the U.S. is a uniquely capable financial entity with an associated population, while your other examples are merely political entities.

To a certain extent we have an opportunity to experiment now. Might as well learn what we can.

Andrew Yang had the right idea with the Freedom Dividend. That's a smart way to frame it, and Alaska is an example of it working with an annual payout to residents ("Permanent Fund Dividend").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

What profit sharing when we run a deficit every year?

Based on what profit? The U.S. economy is on life support and its printing $3+ trillion deficits with massive incoming unfunded liabilities and a shrunken worldwide economy. We are due for a world of hurt and economic pain for the next decade.

Housing has been made artificially scarce by the small property owners (homeowners) who have the most to gain from the situation. The government could make housing 3x-5x cheaper in the space of a decade by greatly curtailing the authority of local zoning boards.

who gets to live in more attractive areas? How different will it be from the current 'projects' living which subsidizes as well?

> What happens when someone spends all their UBI on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry?

What's the difference between that and the current reality? Food stamps can be sold and bought on the black market in exchange for drugs and alcohol; people who want whiskey will be able to get it. Whatever money is spent on enforcing the "sanctity" of food stamps could just go to more people directly.

And this is really the main point: the administrative burden all of these social programs incur, especially in terms of labor and office space, means that a very large sum of money is going into these programs that will never be seen by the people who need help. Just give everyone a check and be done with it.

To answer your main question: the person who blows their UBI suffers. They will be hungry for the rest of the month, and not many people will have sympathy for them because they already got their check. All mentally sane people realize this reality, and that is enough to prevent them from spending their UBI poorly. For the minority of people who are sadly physically addicted to drugs, there can be social programs specifically aimed at recovery and rehabilitation. This was another one of Yang's policies. UBI would help here too: let's say you spend 8 months at a government funded rehab facility while you kick your addiction to meth or heroine. At the end of the 8 months, you have $8000 waiting for you - to go forward, get a job, rent an apartment, and rebuild your life.

This is much cheaper than a bloated social program that ties your aid to measurable checkpoints, like how you have to prove you're looking for a job in order to keep receiving unemployment. Under UBI, the Fed just runs some script every month to raise a double somewhere by $1000; under unemployment they have to hire people to process your application, approve/deny it, review your weekly application submissions, hire someone else to distribute the money, hire a manager for all these people, pay an office to give these people a workplace, pay pensions and benefits for all these employees, etc.

> "What happens when someone spends all their UBI"

I think that's the most important question.

I believe the story is that one will abuse whatever welfare they get. Whether it's stamps, credits, services or money.

Here in Australia they've been trialing a cashless debit card to control what people spend their welfare money on. Somehow, it's still costing _more_ than just giving people money and the recipients aren't happier either. Some are using the card to buy things like batteries and re-selling them to then buy their drugs and alcohol. So there's money spent to restrict the money, but the money is still abused. So why not just give them the money?

In the end - money is money. Poverty is literally only solved with money. Surprisingly, the cheapest and easiest way to solve someone's poverty is to just give them money. If they abuse it? Fine. They were going to do that anyway.

So what if someone spends it all on whiskey or oxy? They're maximising their own preferences. If they were addicted to alcohol, sudden withdrawal can kill.

One of the big reasons for UBI is the belief that an individual can better assess their own needs and wants, and procure them more cheaply than the government.

This is partly a moral/philosphical stand - the tension is between giving individual freedom in the form of money, or giving freedom via paternalistic methods where the government decides what is best for you. It can be argued either way.

I do agree it would be wise to have systems in place to trickle the money in daily instead of monthly - this would help your concern of people blowing all their money at once (but not prevent them spending on what was most important to them).

I also think that just UBI will never be enough - there is a place for targeted government support - healthcare, addiction (part of healthcare), mental health (also part of healthcare).

Food stamps have similar problems to money. Food stamps are sold or the items purchased with food stamps are. The resulting money is used to buy oxy and whiskey. Food stamps are just another currency with a terrible exchange rate.

What happens when someone spends all their labor-earned money on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry?

If someone spends their UBI on drugs instead of food and literally starves as a result, they have done a service to society.

Foodstamps are already being traded for cash/drugs, all you are doing with UBI is removing the middle man.

Appoint a guardianship or place them in a group home. Addiction isn't going to be solved by food stamps. Give them treatment and if they keep relapsing, then declare them incompetent.

If you pay it daily, then they will not go hungry for long.

> I don't think the all-or-nothing approach of UBI makes a ton of sense. We can do things today like more free or subsidized food that would work exactly the same way as it would under UBI, with potentially more buy-in.

Who is suggesting that this is the final form and cannot be ammneded? If anything, I think Dorsey just did what should have been done with the first wave of the vast amount of Campaign funds the 'Yang Gang' raised and actually create a through analysis along with coherent and cogent overview on the means by which it would initially be deployed with all of its cost-risk benefit analysis.

At which point it could then be vetted and and scrutinized via public discourse and eventually be further refined after some changes or be deemed worth a first trial process. I dislike Democracy as a system of governance on just about every aspect, but perhaps this is one of the few usecases it may have as we transition to this model at scale and will require the participation of everyone for it to succeed?

But your position is like following the fallacy that software is 'done' once its beta has been released... that's just not how this works. And the maintenance of this deployment is just as important, or more so depending on its application, as the creation of its earliest iteration.

You're a Cryptocurrency/Bitcoin person, don't you think Aurora was worth it, even though it failed? It showed us what had utility and what seemed sound in a theoretical sense and accepted via convention only to have it be stress tested and fail in practice.

As for subsidizing food, even further no less, is to undermine not just how broken it is but also how one of the biggest reasons the Global Ag/Food Industry not only relies on a system that often yields a near destitute farmer, but is also ultimately built on an expendable and often mistreated and undervalued labor force.

Just look at how meat packer workers are deemed expendable during COVID but required to remain at work due to being an 'essential worker' and a critical link in the Supply Chain, the deaths be damned. We can always get another low skilled, desperate worker to replace them.

You must understand that peril exists for a farmer everyday, getting injured on the job is the norm, working with those (ever compounding) injuries is enshrined within their very culture and it seems near exploitative when properly viewed for what it is as bankruptcy and suicide are often the alternatives to not meet one's obligations in that Industry (see wide scale suicide in Indian Cotton farmers in the 2000s, and the displacement and disenfranchisement of small farmers in the US in the 80-90s caused by large Big Ag-tech, Drug companies and Massive Food consortia).

Food has value that far exceeds its current fiat denominated Market valuation, it is specifically because Governments all over the World subsidize it so heavily (in various ways) and in turn obfuscate the externalities of not just growing a crop but also getting it to Market that it can and often forces a farmer to operate at a net-loss. If you allowed for freer access of Markets that create a means for producers to exchange their products with chefs/restaurants directly as well as the end consumer you'd have a more functional Market based form of price discovery. I should know, I've been both.

So I can tell you right now from both a Biological/Ecology sense as well as a Farmer POV tomatoes will NEVER truly be a $0.99/lbs product if properly priced, they are extremely heavy feeders that will require large preps and amendments to the soil upon planting, and ideally crop rotation as well as lots of labor during and after harvest, but also materials to trellis, prune, the labor costs for pest prevention, weeding, storage, transport etc...

In short, less subsidies could actually create not just more accurate pricing (as food prices are at very skewed Historical lows) but potentially also a greater supply overall as the incentives for growers/producers have been created to profit from a newly created venture if they can deliver to Market a desirable product at a desirable price.

Remember that you get the money back. You're sitting there in the middle saying, $150B/mo? I don't want to have to pay that in taxes. I'd have to pay like $1500/mo more in taxes! But then you'd receive $1500/mo. It cancels out, so it doesn't matter.

You're really only making net transfers to the bottom half, and even most of those aren't for the entire amount. Someone at the 25th percentile gets $1500 but would be paying $750 in tax themselves.

Meanwhile it replaces what the people at the bottom were already getting in food/housing/other assistance. So it really "costs" almost nothing. It may even reduce costs, because now you don't need a wasteful means testing bureaucracy to process and determine eligibility for dozens of separate government benefits that no longer exist.

It's also just not a good idea. Social welfare programs act as single buyers/negotiators and can exploit economies of scale and collective bargaining to deliver reduced costs. Something that individuals can't do.

Giving everyone their own money for, say healthcare costs, and having them navigate markets alone... achieves exactly the kind of divide-and-conquer that price-gouging pharmaceutical companies and hospitals have wet dreams about.

The only good UBI supplements, but does not replace, most existing social welfare programs.

Replacing existing programs just creates an open season for vultures.

If you aren't going to replace existing welfare systems, why not improve them, instead of adding yet another system to the mix?

the other thing is, without proper price controls (rent, basic food stuffs, transportation etc) business will look at it as a chance to jack up prices because "free money"

the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute

so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster

The market approach tends to not work when the participants are not part of the market.

And housing.

Well that's certainly true of every cause right?

It definitely should. But one real problem with bureaucracy is that it tends to go to great lengths to justify itself. It also self-replicates like a virus.

So, in practice, I imagine there would be lots of offices and agencies, services and interdependent liaison offices and agencies along with the requisite inspector general offices and agencies and the necessary committees, subcommittees, and working groups that would have to be created.

In the land of government bureaucracy, the rapidly increasing fixed-pie of current and (hopefully) future taxpayer revenue gets divided up into more and more slices every day.

I think that was a major point, too, because a significant portion of the money available for social assistance is spent on deciding who can get it and fighting 'fraud'. A blanket universal give is a lot easier.

However - I've always been puzzled by how each person in the US doesn't have a public, singularly identifying number assigned. Doesn't that make even an 'universal' basic income hard to define? How do you guarantee that every person gets one, and only one, BI check every month? How do you find out who is dead and should stop getting one...?

From what I know, SSN are used for stuff like that, but there's all this weird stuff about it (althoug I admit my knowledge of it comes from a half forgotten CGP Grey video, and that the impression that stuck)

> Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both.

I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical.

That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.

UBI is indirectly means-tested; if you make too much money, you end up giving back as much or more in taxes and/or partial UBI clawbacks than what you would get via UBI. This actually ends up working better and being cheaper than most alternatives (including the "guaranteed minimum"), because it's comparatively easy to structure a comprehensive tax system so that it minimizes distortions on people's behavior, and hard to design a means-testing policy to the same effect. The latter is especially true given the patchwork of social-insurance programs that currently exists. Giving cash can replace many of these programs, and making the policy a 'universal' one reduces administrative costs.

If the rhetoric is solely around "government spending" then the perspective will always be that UBI is "too expensive".

But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.

I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.

> People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable.

Not really. There are UBI models that are more or less zero cost - taxes are increased by roughly the UBI amount for employed workers, and for the unemployed the UBI would be similar to the unemployment benefits they would lose.

A means tested NIT and a UBI can be designed to be equivalent: https://taxfoundation.org/universal-basic-income-ubi-means-t...

A guaranteed minimum income would need to phase out by income, so as to not discourage people from working if they want to.

> People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable

This is simply false. Please provide sources for this claim.

Most implementations of UBI are comparable to the existing taxation.

I actually think people putting their stimulus checks into the stock market is better than the existing QE system.

Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.

Isn't buying stock a great way to help the economy recover?

Why does someone with a broken arm need more than someone without one if both are unemployed?

You can already see this in countries with less extreme difference in the society's economy, e.g. Scandinavian countries.

They do not have UBI (yet) but have generous benefits for unemployment, sick pay, disabilities and pseudo minimum pay so that most people earn a decent income.

I am not an economist or sociologist but the economy still works, most people still work and it has lead to 2) and 3). There is less interest in the less desirable jobs so their salary has subsequently increased. And there is heavy investment in automation, in farms, in manufacturing, in shops, etc.

It is not perfect though. Maybe UBI will be even better.

It's a gamble - either 2 will lead to 3, or 2 will lead to input and output prices of goods being raised. Probably some of both.

Hopefully more of 3 than the alternative, because the alternative scenario of prices rising has negative consequences in the form of economic deadweight loss even if UBI pays for the price increases.

> which means employers will have to pay more for those jobs

Yeah no kidding so there will be hyperinflation. Making the net effect of UBI almost zilch. What use is $1000 bucks when toilet paper is $100 a roll.

> 3) Because of (2), more research effort and investment will go into automating and otherwise reducing the number of humans required for unpleasant jobs. And with UBI, that becomes an unmitigated good, with no worry about putting people out of work.

So there will be a giant underclass of people who live on nothing but UBI (UBIers) while a small minority of elite researchers in corporate labs come up with more ways to keep the UBIers from earning their own living. Great. And who buys all the stuff? Is the "stuff" just for the gilded class smart enough to work? Or do we just give the UBIers a raise every now and then to "stimulate" the economy? How is this not communism?

> Meanwhile, though, people are starving and dying, in the US, at higher levels than any other industrialized nation, because our social safety net is inadequate.

Yes the death rate is higher in US than a lot of other countries, but overall it is quite low. According to this page [0], it's .64 per 100,000. As of May 20th the population was 329,672,928 [1]. Comes to a total of about 2110 people or 0.0000064 of the population. While tragic nonetheless, is an extremely small number.

[0] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/malnutrit...

[1] https://www.census.gov/popclock/

> It doesn't replace people making things, though. You'd still want to work and provide value to improve your situation.

Doing shitty jobs usually doesn't improve one's situation though. If you earn minimum wage you're going to be better off just trying to gain a marketable skill and living off your income.

You say 'easier for people to take risks'. Well, yeah. So who's gonna be dumb enough to keep scrubbing grime off the bathroom floor when its easy and safe to invest in yourself? There's a solution to that of course, which is "pay people more", which is great. Now people get paid enough to merit working a shit job even with UBI. But now we have a different problem, things cost more to produce, which means prices go up! How much do they go up? Well probably to around the point at which the guy scrubbing grime is at the same level of economic wealth as before, and the guy who stopped to work on self improvement suddenly can't survive on his not-longer-basic UBI.

We need people to perform shitty jobs. Increasing real wages would be a good step to do that. Talk of people being able to take more risks in entrepreneurship is just techie dreams about how it could be better if their privileged economic condition were a little more privileged. It's not wrong, but it's hardly an important problem for society.

There are countries with a permanent dole. See the UK and other Northern Euro nations. You just have to fake an autism diagnosis to get $3k euros a month in cash alone (not counting all the other programs). Why isn't that the entrepreneurship capital of the world? Why is Europe still so poor? Why is America--the only place where there isn't a safety net and you can literally die on the street if you make too many bad decisions--the entrepreneurship capital of the world? Lots of businesses have been founded by people desperate to make a buck. Necessity is the mother of all invention. People take risks out of desperation, not for "fun".

Moved to a poor, small (~250k) "metro" area midwestern city around 2008. Robot arm garbage trucks!

Moved back to a much richer one 10x larger a couple years later. No robot arm garbage trucks then, and still none now. Bags on the end of the driveway, guys hanging on trucks.

"pretty soon" is when? garbage trucks are giant, quarter million dollar machines with giant forks on them that could demolish thousands of homes in an accident before someone shoots its tires. this seems like one of those things that will still be done manually for years after level 5. imagine a self-operated crane constructing a skyscraper. it's not that it's inherently more difficult than self-driving--the stakes are too high and one disaster could undo decades of savings from not hiring people.

It's the same here, but not where I lived a few years ago. It's just not practical in the densely populated inner city. Garbage containers can't be lined up at the street, are stored in back yards etc, and you still need people to pull them to the street and push them back.

Where I live now, that job now is done by the home owners or by staff of the apartment buildings. The job didn't go away, it's just no longer done by the garbage collectors.

Volvo's been working on building self-driving garbage trucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJSHXr8i-ZU

If you wanted to do away with garbage trucks you'd build a tunnel system for trash bins that discharge their contents when prompted.

That may be true in populated areas. But, what about areas that lag behind? Rural america that is too poor to afford robot trucks. I see people hanging off garbage trucks all the time in the midwestern low pop and rural areas.

Seems like nonsense to me to say 'this is universal income just except it's not universal.' If you take away the 'universal' then you're missing the entire point.

A small nit: "Original Medicare" isn't really a UBI because you don't really get to choose your healthcare. A key benefit of a UBI is that the government provides cash to buy goods & services, rather than providing the goods & services themselves. Medicare is a government-run service, where the service is a combination of catastrophic insurance, cost-sharing, and general payment.

Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage, is much closer to a UBI than "Original Medicare". Nearly 40% of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan.

How do you handle people wanting to move to Alaska? And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it?

If you're not asking them to fund it, you're not testing UBI, you're testing "if an external entity provides money to a community without asking for anything in return, will that be cool?"

The annual dividend is around $1000. I wouldn’t call this UBI exactly.

So... let's say 500k people, 10k a year, 10 years, that's 50 billion dollars.

That's... not a small test. That's a small city deciding to go all in on trying it.

I believe what OP is getting at is you need a significant portion of a community to be receiving UBI to truly transform the local economy.

To use an example the Yang often uses: It may not be economically viable to set up a bakery in some small dying town. But if everyone in that town were receiving UBI, it might become viable, due to a change in the town's spending habits.

UBI is no good if it's not durable and reliable to the recipient.

If you imagine that UBI would allow people to live with a lower level of stress around starvation, you have to imagine that they would want to rely on that income a decade from now. Saying "find a rich benefactor to decide to give money away" doesn't reasonably test anything meaningful about UBI. I can tell you that people will generally be happier if you give them money one time. Don't need much experimentation to validate that hypothesis...

I've proposed this very idea to UBI supporters on many occasions, and they always seem to dodge and say it will only work if everyone does it through the government. It's apparently an all-or-nothing situation where the outcome of failure is catastrophic economic collapse. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Isn't the whole point about UBI that you don't lose it if employed?

Not really, the central premise of UBI is that its recurring allowing you to plan for and adapt to the income. This was just a bandaid for a financial disaster.

What is interesting about the payouts is that we magically made the money for them while also magically making the money for a ton of other stuff. Obviously the scale of one time vs recurring is vastly different but I feel like this does go a ways towards proving its possible.

No more so than the 2008 stimulus checks. Both programs were non-universal and under both the number of dollars sent to eligible recipients depended on their incomes.

Savers aren't entitled to a return. No one is entitled to fiat holding or increasing in value. The utility value of capital is declining, plain and simply.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/700-year-decline-of-interes...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/ke...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INTDSRJPM193N

http://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interest...

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/search-interest--ex...

The central bank exists to ensure that your fears here are misplaced.

Yang definitely waffled on MFA and appeared to not support it towards the end. That was something of him that I was disappointed - I couldn't understand why he didn't realize that MFA is the way to go. I do wonder if he waffled on it to retain support from people further to the right.

That said, I actually think Yang's ideas are going to reverberate throughout political discourse over the next decade. Similar to how Bernie pushed the base range of the Democratic party to the left, Yang shed light on some great issues that will plague us. For example, what are going to do about the massive loss of employment due to automation? Are we going to attempt to retrain these people? That's historically not been very successful.

"every time some wackjob group is screaming at him"

"He took a very moderate and reasonable stance "

No, you don't get to label anyone who disagrees with a risky, existential upheaval as a 'whackjob'.

UBI is a fairly extreme ideology, partly because of the social welfare application, but mostly because of the cost - which its proponents tend to ignore.

We can argue a little bit over what 'free money' means for people, but the case falls flat when someone talks about a program that costs $350 Billion a month, or about 3 Trillion a year. FYI US economy is about 20 Trillion.

UBI is not a discussion about 'free money' or 'welfare' or 'means testing'.

UBI is a discussion about the existential level of wealth transfer or debt creation that comes from the most expensive program ever conceived by any government in the history of civilization.

The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?

Because all the nice talking points are otherwise academic.

Yang reminds me a little bit of Marx - really amazing insight and thoughtful understanding of problems ... but solutions that miss the point entirely.

Beautiful quote. Thanks for sharing.

Because then the government inevitably either 1) runs out of money, 2) cuts spending drastically, or 3) drastically increases taxes on the wealthy to pay for everything.

We all know that 1 and 2 (probably) aren't going to happen. And I don't know many republicans that want the wealthy's money redistributed equally amongst all Americans.

>>Every experiment in UBI says otherwise. Direct cash grants usually lead people to do more work, because now they can do the work they enjoy.

But probably less "meaningful" work, in however society defines meaningful.

>>Also, look around groups of wealthy people. The ones who don't have to work anymore. Sure, some of them live a life of leisure, but many of them still work, because they get bored otherwise.

This is due to earning a return matching their effort. At some point, if enough income is withheld at that level, what's the point? Or, they will leave en-mass to countries more willing to employ entrepreneur muscle. These aren't anecdotes. Look at emigration from USSR, China, Venezuela or others of their scientists, professors, doctors, lawyers, financiers, etc.

>Every experiment in UBI says otherwise.

There has never been a test on a scale which would lead people to do it though. If you know you're part of a short lived experiment you're not quitting your job.

> "Also, look around groups of wealthy people. The ones who don't have to work anymore. Sure, some of them live a life of leisure, but many of them still work, because they get bored otherwise."

People who built their wealth, they keep working because it's in their personality makeup.

People who inherit wealth often wind up frittering it away.

>Every experiment in UBI says otherwise.

Has even one of these been a permanent (for the recipients) experiment?

What about work nobody enjoys doing? Who will do this work?

People will always to things they enjoy. No one questions that.

We have paid employment to get people to do things that need to be done!

There are lots of jobs people don't enjoy. Who's going to do those?

If they raise the salaries and start getting applicants, who's going to buy the much more expensive produce? They'd have to increase the amount of ubi, and there you have inflation.

What happens if a large number of people can not afford a meaningfully better lifestyle than what is possible on a UBI because of the tax increases?

(Genuine question, no gotchas here)

Even assuming that the vast majority of people would keep working to maintain their standard of living, there are major issues with UBI:

1) The incentive to enter the workforce is greatly reduced. Every high-school graduate would have the means to shack up with a few of their buddies and live the college lifestyle indefinitely. I'm currently a productive adult, but only because there was no alternative. UBI is an alternative.

2) The nest-egg required to retire is greatly reduced. If a married couple is saving up for retirement with a retirement income of 60K, they're currently need $2,000,000 to retire (pre social security). If that same married couple is receiving 12K each in UBI, the required nest-egg is almost halved to $1,200,000. That means couple can retire a decade earlier than they previously could. This will see millions of people retiring during what would have been their most productive (i.e. tax-payingest) years.

3) Much like a shorter work week, UBI will be a tremendous competitive disadvantage for US goods and services. When the labor market inevitably shrinks, wages will necessarily rise. This will a competitive drag on exports of US goods and services.

I'm not saying that these things are bad. They sound great for the individuals in question. But they will eventually hollow out the workforce.

What I'm confused by is what prevents the cost of housing and luxuries from going up and ultimately defeating UBIs increase? Landlords now know people have a minimum amount of money and theres either mega landlords everywhere or all of them play the only going up game (without needing to actually meet and collude).

> everyone receives a basic income

And, by definition, everybody who earns higher than the median wage will also receive a tax increase higher than the basic income they're being given "back".

If the point is to ensure everyone has a basic income even between jobs, but that nearly everyone will continue to work, and the purpose is to provide a safety net for the unemployed- think a minute before you reply- is it really that different from unemployment insurance?

I don't think UBI is meant to supply a cushy life. You may be able to afford a modest apartment and food, but what about a car? A nice bicycle? A nice phone? Books? Money to actually go out instead of eating soylent? Saving for buying a house or land?

Many people who "go off the reservation" and travel/live mobile tend to settle down after a while.

Good for them. The point of work is to not have to anymore so you can follow your passions. We've invented machines that can do basically everything it takes to support human life. Seems like there should be a lot more people following passions now.

I wish you'd explain why this is a bad thing, and that you'd elaborate on it. Do you think half of the people in a UBI world stop working entirely and subsist entirely on their pittance? A third of the people?

How few people would be allowed to go screw around instead of working, for this outcome to be okay?

You currently don't have the option to not work. Most people work more than they need to because they realize that the future is uncertain and having savings will be beneficial if there's trouble at some point in the future. Give the same people a trust fund that takes care of them and that they trust to last for their life time, and most will stop working as hard. They may still work, but much less and most likely on very different things.

in it there are no 5 hour per week jobs. and cv gaps are frowned upon if you want a new job.

They clearly state you have to be looking for a job. [1]

[1] https://www.ncoa.gov.au/report/appendix-volume-1/9-11-unempl...

> What will you do with your new free time?

I'd focus on accumulating non-monetary assets. Board seats, political connections, et cetera.

Smoke pot and play video games while the fed prints me a paycheck. The American dream

So it's regressive? Even better..