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Originally Posted by New Era
Great comments. But what is the possibility of USGov approving the type of taxation required to support this program. We're talking 254M adults in the US. At $1,000 a month that is $3.048 TRILLION dollars in revenue to be collected and redistributed each year. If we go with the $20,000 a year model, that's $5.08 TRILLION. That's 1/4 of projected GDP for 2020. Where do you find the political support for such a program and such a heavy lift?
The other end of this is, that would mean the end to every social program in the country, including social security and medicare. I'm all for supporting the needy, but I will tell you one thing, I'm not going into retirement and taking a $15K a year haircut on my social security, and have to belly up for healthcare benefits on top of that, to support such a plan. I've worked my whole life and paid my taxes and contributions to social security with the expectation of a payoff in my golden years. That needs to happen. Unless that happens, even the most liberal of Americans will kill this thing in the womb.
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You likely have to kill social security and replace it with UBI to make the numbers work.
The average social security recipient receives 1500 per month so would see a modest bump. It would be interesting to see median benefit to see if most people would be better off. I suspect the Median payment is lower than the average payment so their should be a majority of Americans who will collect more in retirement.
About 1 trillion is collected in social security search year so it is critical that it be part of any UBI solution. If the US went from spending 35% - 50% of its funds publicly (50% tax increase) it would raise another 3 trillion dollars. I don’t know enough about other US social programs like welfare and child benefits to understand how they could be fed into the UBI stream.
In general though it appears that if government spending accounts for 50% of GDP a UBI could be offered to all adults without gutting existing social programs.
I agree it’s not politically palatable in the US or anywhere really.