| > How feasible would getting a federal UBI bill being passed even be? A federal UBI bill? An outside possibility, if the right person was President and pushing for it. Yang’s UBI concept specifically, zero, and anyone making it a centerpiece of their campaign would get roasted as soon as any opposing candidate (or interest group) took it seriously enough to bother looking for holes to poke in it. The big kicker in a Democratic primary: not only is it a huge budget busting expenditure, but it's a huge budget busting expenditure even after accounting all existing welfare as an available funding source, and yet it is often worse for poor families than existing welfare. In a number of states, the benefit level proposed a household with a single adult with two kids would be less than TANF + SNAP (not even counting housing subsidies and other available benefits) are now. (Yang does say current beneficiaries would have a choice with UBI, but the cost and funding doesn't seem to reflect that; if you do that, the cost goes up even more, for the retained welfare benefits and administrative bureaucracy.) > He can want it and push it all day long but if the support from congress isn't there (which it frankly isn't currently), what are the chances it will become reality? To be fair, 100% of the House and 1/3 of the Senate will be elected along with the next President; if a President making UBI a campaign centerpiece is elected (a big “if”), there's a reasonable chance a more favorable Congress will be, too. |