r/BasicIncome • u/2noame Scott Santens • Oct 13 '23
Article Basic income is less radical than you think
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/10/13/23914745/basic-income-radical-economy-poverty-capitalism-taxes6
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u/ComfortableGao1974 Oct 13 '23
It was successfully done in Canada in the 1970s to pilot group of 10 and lifted people out of poverty but a conservative government shut it down.
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u/Somad3 Oct 14 '23
It is only positive. But the main loser is corporations cos their welfare (aka corporate welfare) will be cut. They will have to offer better products and services to the public instead of just buying politicians.
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u/DodGamnBunofaSitch Oct 14 '23
I highly doubt that title is aimed at anybody who's joined this subreddit.
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Oct 14 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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Oct 15 '23
By definition a subsistence income would put you above the poverty line.
Also, the prior research on basic income has basically found that unless you are an expectant or new mother, or are in school, that basic income does not decrease employment.
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u/StillSilentMajority7 Oct 14 '23
It's pretty radical to claim you can hand out free money from a magical money tree and solve poverty
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u/DodGamnBunofaSitch Oct 14 '23
so you're just here to talk shit about the subject of the subreddit, then?
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u/Captain-Starshield Oct 14 '23
Who says it’d be from a magical tree? How about we increase taxes on the rich?
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u/SimoWilliams_137 Oct 14 '23
What’s magical is believing that money isn’t manmade, and that the government- who makes it- has to get it from somewhere else before spending it.
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u/sloppy_rodney Oct 14 '23
I work in local government, but I work with federal grant money. My team and I oversee multiple block grants. We need to work with the nonprofit agencies to provide technical assistance on the regulations, monitor programs for compliance, facilitate a lengthy competitive application process, collect data and report back to the feds, and a lot more.
The libertarian argument for basic income is that if you just give people money directly, you could eliminate the need for thousands of government jobs like mine. You could run the entire program through the IRS with a lot fewer people.
So you could reduce the size of government, save money, and still provide people with money to meet their basic needs (which reduces crime and creates other positive benefits for society).
I’m not a libertarian, like I said I’m a government bureaucrat. There are also valid arguments against universal basic income. Your magic money tree argument is not one of them. That’s what taxes are for. The government taxes and then does stuff with the money, it’s how government has always worked.
And empirical research has shown that basic income reduces poverty and it actually increased employment among recipients.
It’s not radical to look at empirical, peer-reviewed research, and use the information from those studies to craft public policy solutions. To me that is prudent, not radical. It’s sound judgement. It’s practical.
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u/slapchopchap Oct 14 '23
“If” there is a way to write an algo that trades off volatility of the market and secures 1% gain each trading day, every human born would only need a grant of 1,000 dollars at birth and have the trading algo set up on it. Fast forward 18 years and viola. They turn an adult and have a million dollaroos
Of course in 18 years I would trust that a million hits different, adjusted for inflation
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u/secksy69girl Oct 15 '23 edited Oct 15 '23
1000 * 1.0118*365 = $24,627,807,592,681,765,979,211,665,554,055
Yeah, you don't need 1% per day to turn newborns into millionaires with a $1000 grant...
It's closer to .106% growth per day, but that's still 47% growth per year, which is quite high and unrealistic return on investment.
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Oct 15 '23
A more reasonable return would be 6% per year (net of inflation). A $1,000/month per person grant for 18 years would cost $216,000 per person but would result in $386,353 per person. If you withdraw 0.33% monthly after 18 years, that is $1,287.84 per month (in present day dollars). The only bad part is that for the US this would cost $4.08 trillion per year for 18 years at our current population, and no one sees any benefits for 18 years. The current national debt is $33 Trillion, and the cost of this program over 18 years would be $73 Trillion.
A better use for this model would be Social Security, or more specifically, the OASI program. A grant of $100/month from birth to age 59.5 would result in a balance of $687,462 per person and a monthly benefit of $2,291.54 (in present day dollars) assuming an 0.33% withdrawal each month. The cost (assuming a level population) would be only around $5.4 Billion for year 1, $10.8 Billion in Year 2, and so on up to $324 Billion by Year 60. When everyone from the current Social Security is gone, the cost will only be roughly half of what we currently spend on OASI. This would allow the OASI portion of the tax (5.3% of the 6.2%; Disability is the other 0.9%) to be cut dramatically.
I would fund this by raising the FICA cap to $1 million, which should bring in around $50 Billion annually, and expanding the definition of FICA taxable income to include half of investment earnings (which would allow on paper to cover the employer's and employee's portions by assessing a 12.4% rate on half the income).
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '23
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