[semigeek]

Honest question; what numbers are you using to say it's a comparable amount? My quick search shows total 2016 expenditures of ~$3.9 Trillion. If you assume welfare is everything non-interest & defense related, that's about $3 Trillion; there's other non-welfare lumped in that number, but let's just use it anyway. That's $9,250 per person.

[zanny]

Almost every discussion about basic income comes to talking about it as a monetary black hole where you pour trillions in and your society has no reasonable expectation of return, much like military spending.

That is not at all how it works. A basic income within reason would almost always be an economic growth mechanism by transferring money from investment class to consumption class. The market for the guaranteed needs of an adopting nations population would be an incredibly large, incredibly stable business center for competition and innovation, and it would increase market participation by eliminating the barrier to entry that is currently made by gated welfare.

Of course we need long run, wide spread, UBI experiments. If all you are talking about is "what if" any reasonable scientist would balk at the conversation. But if you take historic evidence - that giving the poor money makes them, by overwhelming margins, and on average, spend it on their needs in predictable, immediate ways, you would be getting similar economic motivator returns on UBI taxes as you would on some forms of infrastructure.

And by comparison, infrastructure projects also considered a net positive policy because the money made by businesses using your infrastructure vastly eclipses the costs of building and maintaining it. UBI works the same way, by creating stable demand for the necessities of life, and providing the means for a similar force multiplier in people wanting to contribute optimally to the economy by their own judgment than by the will of money in the hands of others for those individuals profit. Because sometimes, making a major stakeholder in a company richer does not mean the greatest source of economic growth for the society as a whole compared to the entrepreneurial potential of every citizen presently bound to that model.

[hueving]

>transferring money from investment class to consumption class.

That's not nearly enough to cover it. The top 1% has 38% of the wealth. In 2009 total wealth of US was 55 trillion[1]. That leaves us 20.9T to spread around 315 remaining millions. That's about $66,300 per person from our anti-rich crusade. Not a bad bounty, but that's a one-time prize. How do you intend to fund UBI for anything longer than a trivial amount of time (<5 years) with such a small sum?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#/m...

[aninhumer]

That's wealth, not income.

Capital owners will have increased costs due to taxation, but they'll also have increased demand for their goods and services.

[ebalit]

I'm not sure these calculations on the back of an envelope are the correct way to understand the problem, but let's try.

US population: 322 millions US national income: 15.78 trillions $

To give a 10000$ UBI to every person in the US, you need to tax 20.41% of the national income.

[int_19h]

"Redistribution" doesn't mean you take rich people's money in a one-off scheme. It means that you tax them higher. One particular opportunity there is capital gains tax, which has been much lower than sweat-of-the-brow income for a long time now. Equalize the rates (or better yet, jack capital gains up even higher - there's no reason to encourage economic rent over labor), and you've got a very nice monetary stream to direct elsewhere.

[kctess5]

I'm not convinced your math is accurate. I'm definitely not an expert, but I also don't think the money would just disappear into the void - presumably it would continue to cycle through the economy.

[oldmanjay]

If you're under the impression that military spending has no expectation of return at all you aren't looking at things realistically.

[hx87]

Military spending resembles insurance to some extent--sure, the returns are normally terrible, but unexpected events that the spending covers are even more terrible.

[aninhumer]

Don't forget all the events that don't happen because of your military spending. A country with a weak military could be an attractive target.

[PKop]

What about price inflation amongst these necessities resulting from immediate increase in money supply within poor population? I can't understand how this wouldn't be an issue... Would housing prices not rise accordingly, for example?

[zanny]

Housing prices today are going out of control because the supply of what people want housing for - jobs - is diminishing. As the job market shrinks and more and more people are dropped out of the economy due to automation, there is more and more demand to live where jobs are, which drives housing prices out of control in many places like NY or SF but almost every major metro area experiences it.

It is confounded by the growing wealth inequality, where the rich find it a valuable asset to buy up these valuable residential buildings that are in demand as a store of value, further diminishing the supply and further exacerbating the problem.

Under a UBI, the market for residential is restored to what it was decades ago when the towns now abandoned in the post-industrial US were populated. There are many times more houses than homeless in the US, but because those homes are located nowhere near a stable income nobody can live in them.

The same applies to food and electricity. We are not at any supply side bounding here, and a UBI makes these makes so incredibly stable and predictable it lets the margins of businesses operating in them get as close to break even as possible because of the certainty metrics now associated with them.

[hx87]

It's even better if UBI is funded by a nationwide land value tax, which would discourage both NIMBYism in low density, high value communities and using real estate as a store of wealth (instead of as a productive investment).

[nylsaar]

Yes. If a modest amount of 9k would work, then giving everyone a million each would work as well. The Keynesian economist in Washington and Tokyo have already filled up the bathtub to no avail. This is the difference between money and currency.

[hx87]

You're thinking of monetary expansion, which in modern economies often doesn't work because the banks get the money first and do nothing but park it.

[flukus]

Competition. Most necessities of life have a lot of competition in the market.