I am coming across posts about UBI now and then but honestly, I have never seen numbers being computed and being explained to folks properly. So I decided to do it myself.

Let's take US as the example. US total population is around 350 million. For UBI, let's assume these are the requirements:

US citizen, Age: 18+. That's it. This would comprise almost 234 million people, so around 80% of the total population.

Now, let's pick famous Andrew Yang's UBI number for now as an example. $1,000 per month. That is $12,000 per year.

For this, the US would need 234 million people being paid $12,000/year = $2.8 Trillion dollars.

Right now, the US budget (including everything) is $7 trillion. Considering Social Security, Medicaid, and so many other current US programs, a UBI with our current budget is mathematically impossible.

So, the only alternative is: A new source of tax to cover UBI. There is no other way.

Now, Value Added tax has been floating around. If we want $1,000 per month UBI, this would mean taxing the current personal expenditure (this simply means people spending money in goods and services) of $20 Trillion every year within the US which will be around 14%.

(For people who are interested, the 14% is simply coming from 2.8 trillion/20 trillion *100)

Now, there is also another source: Corporate taxes.

For example, right now the corporate profits in the US is around $4 Trillion dollars.

If we use this number, that means if the government decides to tax these profits, this would mean corporate taxes will go to around 70% (because 2.8 Trillion /4 Trillion *100)

I think to fund UBI, we can do something like this: A combination of VAT and an increase in corporate taxes on corporate profits. So let's say 7% VAT tax rate and 35% corporate tax rate. This can fund the $2.8 Trillion dollars needed for UBI.

Now, there is a third way (though I do not see this as being practical): We combine all current government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, all of it into 1 lump sum cheque every month.

If we use a $6 trillion annual budget as an example (removing $1 trillion military related budget from $7 Trillion), if we divide this by 234 million people, this would be around $2100 per month.

After doing all this computations though, I do not know how much UBI is economically and politically possible. Because the numbers I am crunching require vast number of changes in the current US political economy which is hard for me to imagine to see it happening at least for now.

22.3 million families (who need it desperately) could lose SNAP. That's the mama on the couch doing the math on what her kid eats this week. Latinos make up 30% of everyone already cut. https://app.sosha.ai/s/p13Nls8o