[ivalm]

It is paid for by a net positive tax reform. My preferred would be something along the lines of wealth tax (I don’t want to tax productivity, ie income, but I have little sympathy for passive hoarders of wealth; I understand there are major legal and logistic hurdles; my current pet approach would be something along the lines of significant interest rate increase (to make money more valuable) combined with significant quantitative easing (essentially taxing money)).

[thorwasdfasdf]

There isn't nearly enough wealth to make that work. I've already run the numbers on this. Even if you taxed every last billionaire in the US and stole their entire net worth and divied up all their wealth among every US citizen, it would still only be 300$ a year per person over 30 years. It doesn't work.

The problem with the world isn't distribution of wealth. The problem is NOT enough wealth in the first place. We need to concentrate on addressing that problem.

Also, gov is already such an enormous burden on people in the US. Right now almost 40% of US GDP is gov spending. that means the average person is loosing 4 out of every 10$ their earning. And, that's just the average. I'm sure in coastal areas the burden is much much higher.

[Dylan16807]

Money goes in circles, so I'm not sure how useful a comparison that is. And there's a ton of rich people that have 8 or 9 digits of wealth, too.

> that means the average person is loosing 4 out of every 10$ their earning. And, that's just the average.

Yeah, that's just the average. The median person is paying less, and should be paying even less than that.

[rainyMammoth]

Andrew Yang's argument is that a lot of people already receive some level of help from the state (food stamps, unemployment, etc) which would be transferred to cash instead. So you need to account for those as well.

[labcomputer]

I don't get it: So the idea is to help the middle class at the expense of the poor?

It sounds like you're saying that people who depend on food stamps and unemployment will see a smaller benefit under UBI than people who earn enough not to require those benefits.

[rainyMammoth]

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying. The way I understood his argument is that it would remove all the existing social aids such as unemployment benefits, food stamps etc and replace all of those with UBI. This means that everyone would get 1000$ a month. 1000$ a month is MORE than what you would get with food stamps etc so the "poor" are coming out of this ahead.

1000$ a month was chosen because you are supposed to be able to live with that amount. I would expect to be extra allowances for children etc.

There is no such thing as "at the expense of the poor" here. Everybody gets it. If you are middle class it comes out directly out of your taxes anyway. It is a minimum income that should help you decide to start a new career or create a small company for example, now that you know that whatever happens you will always get 1000$ a month.

[Avicebron]

This, it's partly a flywheel to generate more maneuverability therefor innovation and business creating risk taking. Adding to the economy, not detracting.

[ivalm]

The middle class will also pay additional taxes (although less than their ubi). UBI is basically an offset to the curve of progressive tax rate.

[ivalm]

Why limit to billionaires? Total net assets in the US ~ $270T, so you can pay for UBI and balance the budget with under 2% wealth tax.

The real problem is how to realize this tax. I think it is probably too hard to actually appraise everything/etc; thus something like a monetary policy might be appropriate. The problem here is that USD is not in a vacuum so side effects might make this impossible.