[Reedx]

That's not how he portrays it though:

The means to pay for a Universal Basic Income will come from 4 sources:

1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of Universal Basic Income because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.

2. A VAT. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at half the European level would generate $800 billion in new revenue. A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.

3. New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $500 – 600 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity.

4. We currently spend over one trillion dollars on health care, incarceration, homelessness services and the like. We would save $100 – 200 billion as people would take better care of themselves and avoid the emergency room, jail, and the street and would generally be more functional. Universal Basic Income would pay for itself by helping people avoid our institutions, which is when our costs shoot up. Some studies have shown that $1 to a poor parent will result in as much as $7 in cost-savings and economic growth.

From https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/

[thatfrenchguy]

VAT is one of the most regressive taxes though, I don’t understand how as a progressive one could see this as a benefit.

[nailer]

Essentially Amazon and Google etc pay little corporation tax due to legal avoidance schemes. VAT is one way to make sure they pay their share.

[calecon323]

All these points have serious problems though.

1. The $500 billion spent on welfare and other income support programs is usually significantly more generous than what a recipient would receive through Yang's proposed UBI. The fact you don't have to cover some people who already receive even more generous benefits doesn't "save you money" in any real sense. There is no real reason someone would choose a UBI over these programs except paperwork.

2. A VAT only gets you $800 billon a year when you need at least something like $3 trillion. This policy is also a little hard to understand if you are left leaning; don't you want to spend new tax revenue on something like universal healthcare, reducing the cost of college or renewable energy expansion? If you raise taxes to pay for a UBI it just becomes harder to raise tax revenue for any other priorities.

3. The roosevelt institute study assumed that the economy was almost completely constrained by demand to the point where even if the UBI was funded entirely through debt the net result would be an economy 13% larger after eight years. Leaving aside whether you agree with their simulation(I don't); this is an incredibly risking bet, if you are wrong that the economy is constrained by demand you have dramatically increased the federal deficit and probably caused a fiscal crisis in the process which would, of course, dramatically shrink the economy. It's interesting to note that the Roosevelt study doesn't actually model Yang's proposal of financing essentially the cost of a UBI through taxes/ spending cuts with the rest through deficit spending and it's hard to see how he came up with the numbers here.

4. So assuming you can save $100-200 billion on other government programs and you get everyone who uses welfare assistance to sign up for a UBI instead you aren't even halfway to the $3.6 trillion dollar price tag.

[dragonwriter]

I'm a UBI supporter, and every one of these points has serious problems.

> 1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of Universal Basic Income because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.

Making UBI a choice vs. existing programs is administratively problematic (and, also, makes no sense.) But a lot of current welfare spending is state and local, and some of what he mentions (disability insurance) is not only state/local, but not classic welfare spending, it's insurance against loss of income, which UBI, despite raising the income floor, does not provide or meaningfully substitute for.

> A VAT. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at half the European level would generate $800 billion in new revenue.

What's the “European Level” referenced here? European VAT levels range between something like 8% and 27%.

> A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.

Yes, you can collect tax on income gained through capital investments like robots and software. We do that today, just at lower rates than labor income, but there's nothing fundamental that requires such lower rates.

> New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $500 – 600 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity.

At best, the growth and new revenue lags; it helps with the steady state cost, but you still have to deal with getting there.

> We currently spend over one trillion dollars on health care, incarceration, homelessness services and the like.

That's true (talking government spending) even if you cut out everything after health care, but...

> We would save $100 – 200 billion as people would take better care of themselves and avoid the emergency room, jail, and the street and would generally be more functional.

That's... extremely optimistic for a $1K UBI. Especially since much of the government cost of healthcare, which is the bulk of this category, is in means-tested programs, particularly Medicaid, which presumably was already fully counted when you counted the full cost of existing “welfare” programs.

[Isomatik]

Some additional downers: - The Roosevelt Institute growth numbers are based on this initiative being 100% funded by increasing the federal deficit. The same report deduced that if the initiative is paid for by increasing taxes on the remaining population, the net effect on GDP, prices, and wages will be closer to zero, just money changing hands. Yang's proposal will fit somewhere in the middle, with roughly one third to half of the cost coming from VAT. The study's model also relies on the following assumptions, both of which I personally do not believe will hold, especially if the main revenue source will be a VAT: "1. Unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply. 2. Increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior." [1, page 5,12]

- Over half of means-tested welfare (including Medicaid) goes to people under the age of 18, so these costs won't be touched. "In an average month during 2012, 39.2% of children received some type of means-tested benefit, compared with 16.6% of people aged 18 to 64 and 12.6% of people 65 years and older." The median monthly benefit for these groups was $447, $393, and $303 respectively. The only means tested program that isn't dominated by minors is SSI, the vast majority of which goes to the elderly and people 18 to 64 with disabilities who would not re-enter the workforce. [2, p16, 24]

[1] http://rooseveltinstitute.org/modeling-macroeconomic-effects... [2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

[manfredo]

I don't see how he's portraying it differently. He's still essentially banking on some utopian vision actually coming true. Replacing welfare? Sure we may be able to decrease it, but what are we gonna do with the minority of people that squander their UBI check? Let them starve? His VAT proposal isn't even on the same order of magnitude of what it would take to pay for the program. Heck, even if you add up the proposed VAT tax and all the purported savings it doesn't even add up to the cost of the UBI checks let alone the administrative overhead:

(5-6bn in welfare cuts) +

(8bn in vat) +

(5-6bn in magic economic growth) +

(1-2bn in cutting stuff he doesn't really elaborate on) =

(1.8-2.1trn).

So even if all his fantastic predictions come true we're still short of the 3.1 trillion to give 1k UBI checks to all ~260m adult Americans.

[nailer]

He broke down the 3tn a year on his Rogan interview. And yes, if you squander your UBI you squander it. Like if your squander your welfare now.

[manfredo]

And you really think society is just going to let people starve in the streets? Yeah, no. We're going to end up paying die both UBI and welfare.

Regardless of his purported numbers he's still banking on massive economic growth happening at the same time as a massive tax increase. This is next-level voodoo economics.

[dragonwriter]

> And you really think society is just going to let people starve in the streets?

We (at least, public direct aid programs; food banks etc., may pick up some of the slack) do now if people squander welfare, why would UBI change that?

[manfredo]

My point exactly. Yang's assumption that we'll be able to scrap welfare program if we give people UBI is a fantasy. Because UBI won't change the fact that many people are still going to need welfare, UBI or not.

[dragonwriter]

> My point exactly.

Well, exactly the opposite, but sure.

> Yang's assumption that we'll be able to scrap welfare program if we give people UBI is a fantasy. Because UBI won't change the fact that many people are still going to need welfare, UBI or not.

No, your idea that we will be compelled to double cover against because some people might not use their first-line benefits ideally is fantasy, because people not doing that happens now and we are fine not double covering.

[nailer]

OK but why? People need money. Why does it matter whether it's called 'welfare' or 'freedom dividend'?