[jariel]

"every time some wackjob group is screaming at him"

"He took a very moderate and reasonable stance "

No, you don't get to label anyone who disagrees with a risky, existential upheaval as a 'whackjob'.

UBI is a fairly extreme ideology, partly because of the social welfare application, but mostly because of the cost - which its proponents tend to ignore.

We can argue a little bit over what 'free money' means for people, but the case falls flat when someone talks about a program that costs $350 Billion a month, or about 3 Trillion a year. FYI US economy is about 20 Trillion.

UBI is not a discussion about 'free money' or 'welfare' or 'means testing'.

UBI is a discussion about the existential level of wealth transfer or debt creation that comes from the most expensive program ever conceived by any government in the history of civilization.

The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?

Because all the nice talking points are otherwise academic.

Yang reminds me a little bit of Marx - really amazing insight and thoughtful understanding of problems ... but solutions that miss the point entirely.

[RockIslandLine]

"The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?"

Congressional appropriations create money. That's how fiat currency works. We're not on the Gold Standard, we don't need to trace who holds how many Pretty Yellow Rocks.

The real question is "What is the inflationary impact of that spending?", and thus what level taxes have to be raised to destroy enough money to negate the inflation.

[somebodythere]

One interesting insight of MMT is that taxing $1,000 from the rich and giving $1,000 to the poor, is not actually necessarily "free", or net-non-inflationary. Because the poor on average spend more of the money that they have (on basic necessities like food and consumer goods), causing prices of those goods to rise which reflects in headline inflation. Whereas money in the hands of the rich tends to result in inflation of financial asset prices.

If a redistribution of this sort did cause a too-high level of consumer inflation, some additional counter-cyclical policy would be needed to counteract it. (The point I'm trying to make is that making sure that federal spending debits and credits cancel out to zero is neither necessary nor sufficient for good economic policy.)

[cmendel]

>about 3 Trillion a year. What a coincidence, that is approximately how much we've spent on corporate welfare since the Corona Virus crisis started.

[jariel]

Yes, and it's part and parcel of the worst economic crises since the great depression, and in some ways worse than the great depression, i.e. the worst numbers in the history of the entire US.

So yes, the scale and repercussions of UBI are issues that nobody seems to want to talk about.