[waterTanuki]

UBI isn't about making financial sense it's about keeping the last traces of society duct taped together before it all collapses. Remove all pathways to a middle-class life and you're left with a populace on the precipice of violent revolts.

[adastra22]

What I mean is that it simply would not work. The math doesn't add up. It would directly lead to Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Which is a far worse outcome.

[marssaxman]

Depends on how you define it, I suppose. The State of Alaska has been providing a universal basic income to its residents for almost half a century now, and that seems to work just fine.

[hollerith]

Not enough to live on. In 2022, the payment was $3,284 per eligible resident, and the 2023 payment was $1,312. I could not easily find the 2024 figure. This is is paid once a year, not monthly.

It is called the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.

[adastra22]

Also - importantly - it is not an income tax revenue funded payment. It is a distribution of proceeds from a productive business.

Think of it this way: the entire world pays Alaska residents for the use of their oil, as a sort of tax that is worked into every energy intensive step of industry or petroleum-derived material.

Alaska's oil is only ~1% of world oil production, but its population is approximately 0.01% of world population, so Alaska residents get approximately 100x what the global per capita oil dividend would be. Oil industry is approximately 2.5% of global GDP. Stack all these multipliers together and we could expect a global per-capita total-GDP dividend of between $525 - $1325 per person per year. Exceeding this (as we did with PPP "loans" during COVID) would have compounding economic effects that lead to hyperinflation.

This is napkin math with spherical cow assumptions. Other factors would further limit UBI dividends to be less than this. But it shows that with existing national dividend systems as model, we can't even get within an order of magnitude of the low end of what UBI proponents are advocating.

[marssaxman]

I'm familiar with it. My point is that one needn't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good: a UBI does not have to offer a full living income to be worth doing.

[adastra22]

It doesn't really approach "basic income" if it is, say, $500/yr.

[marssaxman]

You are talking about a full basic income. My point is that a partial basic income is both achievable and useful.

[hollerith]

I agree.