| It's not a question. We passed the point where children have less than a 50% chance of being wealthier than their parents sometime around 1980: https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here. The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires. UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time. Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US: https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen... But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%. UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%. I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility. |