Opinion of Universal Basic Income

[Antonio the Sixth]

Freedom policy in conjunction with a comprehensive welfare state providing free access to other basic goods and services, and not as a substitute for all that.

Doesn't seem all that expensive to me either. Let's say we make it $1000 a month - that would be $12,000 a year. Based on DC's chart, that would cover about 10% of households (does this reweight income by household size, btw? Because it's a pretty meaningless chart otherwise). That would be around 12.5 million households. But you don't have to give $12,000 to each, just enough for them to get to $12,000. A majority of them seem like they already make more than half that much, so let's say on average we give around $5000 each. That's a total cost of around $60 billion, ie 1.5% of the federal budget. You can easily pay for it by scrapping one or two useless military programs.

[Antonio the Sixth]

snip

Fair point. The thing is, I'm not really concerned with "perverse incentives" because, to be honest, I don't want to encourage people to work. I think people should work if they want to, but I don't subscribe to the visions of society wherein employment should be the ultimate goal of an individual. The current economic system makes it perfectly possible to guarantee everyone a comfortable existence even if a significant share of the workforce doesn't participate, provided sufficient redistribution.

Still, if my estimate was too conservative, let's triple it: still less than 5% of the budget. It would require a few changes to pay for it, but would still be far from having a prohibitive cost.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'll just say that calling it a "tax" in this context is highly disingenuous.

Of course my preferred solution would be a much more expansive minimum income with no clawbacks whatsoever, to be funded through hyper-progressive income taxes, but I'd settle for a more restrictive proposal that still does a lot of good if it's more politically feasible.

[Antonio the Sixth]

FP in theory, but, just like Communism, HP in practice.

makes u think