Let’s say that you can get enough calories to survive on $2 per day. That leaves $0 for rent, heat, electricity. Anyone who suggests that $700 is a “basic income” or a “safety net” in the USA, is going to be ridiculed for being out of touch with reality. Frankly, it’s an insulting amount.
As I said above, a UBI doesn’t need to be a living wage. It’s not intended to replace all other sources of income or allow people to retire at 18.
The Gallup report I linked to earlier found that median income in the US is roughly $15,480, so for half the population in the US, $2 a day ($730 a year) represents a greater than 4.7% raise. You might be insulted, but for many, $2 a day is a meaningful increase in earnings, and we should expect it to significantly impact their lives.
Then it’s an income supplement or a subsidy and not a “basic income”.
It can’t be considered an adequate replacement for welfare payments, so it would not eliminate that government expense or the associated bureaucracy.
This is weird definition of income, and I disagree, but you’re making a distinction without a difference. It’s a universal, unconditional payment. Call it whatever you want.
It can be considered an adequate replacement for some welfare payments, and it would eliminate some government bureaucracy and expense.
The concept of UBI has some associated goals and assumptions. If the government gave everyone $1 per year, would it be UBI?
Funny given your OP, in which you propose that people don’t even get cash until the government approves. If the “money” goes into an HSA, then obviously it’s not an unconditional payment.
Well, it would create another bureaucracy which administers the UBI. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say that some unknown amount of welfare expense might be reduced. 
Is a grain of sand a heap? I don’t think what we call it is an interesting or important question. I would not advocate for $1 a year payment, whatever it’s called.
Fair point. I still think it is ultimately universal and unconditional, because the money ultimately either gets spent on healthcare costs that the individual incurs, or converts to cash. Since it does pay out as cash eventually, and it’s in an interest-bearing account in the meantime, the benefit is similar, and the real value is probably roughly equal over time. I do agree that it’s not a ‘pure’ cash payout, and the period in which it’s in the HSA limits the benefits because, as you rightly note, it’s note cash. For practical purposes, though, after whatever holding period or minimum is reached, additional payments are effectively cash.
Valuation seems a bit complicated. On the one hand, money that’s not yet available to cash is worth less than cash in hand. But since an HSA can be interest-bearing, this difference may be offset, possibly to zero (in an efficient market, it should be break-even). Add to that the money currently has value as a voucher for healthcare, and there may be additional offset, although maintaining that liquidity will limit the kinds of investments that can be made with HSA funds, and so limit the potential return. I’m tempted to say that the value is roughly cash equivalent in an efficient market, and only a little less than equivalent in the real world. They are effectively vouchers that turn into cash after a certain period, and they gain interest in the interval.
This too is a fair point. This is a big part of why I think a $1 per person per year UBI wouldn’t be worthwhile. The UBI does have an upfront cost associated with developing and implementing the agency that handles payments. For a normal UBI, it’s been proposed to implement the UBI as a refundable tax credit, in which case the IRS can handle it and the additional overhead is low. But here, where the money is paid into special accounts, up-front costs would be larger, and the payout should be high enough to justify them.
The more complete proposal I mentioned earlier projects an upfront cost of about 7.5%, falling over time (as carbon taxes increase) to about 1%, and a roughly fixed administrative cost in the range of $5-6 billion (and I believe this is for a new, IRS-like administrative body). For a $700 a year program, that’s about 2% overhead. Estimates for SNAP from 2012 are in the range of 10% overhead, and that may not include e.g. pensions for government employees who oversee the program.
I checked out the link. Nowhere did I see an estimate of total revenue produced by the carbon tax, nor did I see an estimate of total cost to consumers in higher prices. What would be the effect of these taxes on gasoline prices? Currently a 31 cents per gallon tax on gasoline at the federal level raised $35 billion dollars in 2014. If you want to jump from this to $100 billion you’re going to need to about triple the per gallon tax, namely you go from 31 cents to about $1 per gallon (assuming the new taxes do not impact demand too much, thus driving down total revenue produced by the tax, which is, ironically, also part of the goal of these taxes, namely to reduce gasoline use). If you want to get to $200 billion in revenue you need about $2 per gallon of taxes, up from currently 31 cents. So every consumer will be paying not $3 a gallon but around $5 a gallon. And again this isn’t factoring in demand and supply concerns. Gas prices are bound to go up naturally soon anyway because the current state of overproduction of crude oil cannot last forever.
So $50 per month for a family of four, do you seriously think that does anything to alleviate poverty? How can you possibly consider around $12 per person a month to make any fucking dent in poverty? Why don’t you go find a poor person and tell them you’re going to alleviate their poverty by giving them $12 a month, and see how they laugh at you.
But yeah, at $400 a month for a family of four, then maybe we’re starting to see some real impact. In which case, we are at $100 per person, still not very much, around half of my (The Economist’s) initial UBI estimate. Thus we can take $100 per month x 12 months x 326,291,926 people = $391,550,311,200 per year in 2035 or whenever we end up reaching the $400 per family of four payout rate.
This is just basic math. If you have 326,291,926 people and each gets $X a month, you can figure out the total cost for yourself. This is just the hard reality of the numbers. In no way can you claim that this carbon tax and UBI scheme is not incredibly expensive. Even at $12.50 a month per person (your initial rate) the total cost is $12.50 a month x 12 months x 326,291,926 people = $48,943,788,900 a year. That is still 48 billion dollars a year that you are draining out of the economy in the form of higher taxes on fuel. If we use this number (and again, this is pretty stupid, since $12.50 a month doesn’t make one bit of difference to anyone) we are essentially doubling the current federal taxes on a gallon of gasoline, going from 31 cents to 62 cents a gallon.
So your proposal is to double the federal gasoline tax in order to give everyone $12.50 a month in UBI. I want to point out how silly this all is. You want to make a reasonable difference in people’s lives, you’re going to need to increase that by about 10x, at which point gas becomes unaffordable.
Now I want to address the philosophical concerns. What is income? You get paid income because you did work, namely because you produced value and sold that value. A worker produces value for his employer, and gives that value immediately to the employer; the employer in return pays the worker a wage or salary. This is what it means to work, to earn income. Unearned income is when someone gives you something without you needing to do anything for it. Why do we have welfare? Because we recognize that sometimes people need more money than they can earn for themselves, so we help them out at public cost (yours and my tax dollars, plus more federal debt, which is just future tax dollars). If we have UBI sufficient to make a difference in people’s lives, then we are essentially ending the relationship between income and work; anyone can do no work and still earn income. Does this make sense to you? If you want to claim that the income through UBI will not be enough to make someone not need to work, then you are basically saying that UBI will not be a replacement for welfare and social security. In which case, why would we even do it? It does nothing to solve poverty.
The way to solve poverty is to help people be productive. Give them job skills, job training, provide stable housing, and help them get a job. This should be the way that any money is used to alleviate poverty. If you pay someone to sit around doing nothing, then they are probably going to keep doing that. This is basic common sense.
You’re deliberately comparing apples and oranges here. You can’t compare a cost of living or an income from the USA and Brazil, these are two entirely different countries and economies. What half the population of earth earns isn’t comparable to conditions in the modern western world, where we actually have some semblance of civilization and an advanced, industrial and free economy. If you want the rest of the world to catch up to the west, then you should be advocating for the rest of the world to start emulating western economies, societies, and human rights.
Also, you simply dodged the issue. The $200 a month isn’t arbitrary, as you keep claiming. It is a number used as an estimate. This number is included in your own link that goes from $50 to $400 a month. Are your numbers arbitrary too? I don’t think so, you need to state a value and posit according to that value. I am saying that $50 a month is laughably insignificant, and you do need to get to around $100 a person ($400 per family of four) to start making any minimal impact on people’s lives. Even at double that, $200 a month per person, as I already spelled out here you are only giving them $50 a week which is less than $8 a meal per day. Sure, it has some small impact, but are you really addressing poverty? I don’t think so.
Yes, and there is a reason for this. Life is also a hell of a lot more expensive in the US than it is in the third world. Someone in the third world may survive on $2 a day but you sure as hell can’t do that in the USA. You are only counting food, which isn’t even possible to live on with $2 a day anyway, but even if it were that doesn’t factor in shelter, clothes, medical, heat, transportation, or anything else. If you want to claim it is possible for someone in the USA to live on $60 a month in total income, I would say you are completely crazy
… yeah, no.
Anyway, this is getting tedious. You continue to refuse to provide actual numbers, so I keep having to come up with the numbers for you, which you keep rejecting. Why don’t you just tell me exactly how much UBI will cost in how you want to see it, and precisely from where all that money comes (does it all come from gas taxes?)
Also, gas taxes are highly regressive. They affect the poor way more than the rich. Are you ok with that? You want $5 a gallon of gas so everyone can get a little $100 a month from the IRS? Really? How will that affect the poor?
These are good questions, and worth discussing.
To #1, I disagree that income has anything to do with work. Many people get money unrelated to work: allowance, inheritance, lotteries and prizes, lawsuits and settlements and insurance payments, residuals from intellectual property, investment returns, etc. I understand the impetus to connect cash inflow to work, but the reality is that earnings are already significantly divorced from work. In particular, people who are wealthy generally have significantly more unearned cash inflows than those who are poor. So a UBI wouldn’t be creating an unearned income where none exists, it would ensuring that everyone gets some unearned income, instead of just those whose families and communities can afford it.
To #2, I basically agree with you as to the motivation for welfare. We recognize that at least some types of poverty are unrelated to desert. Where we may disagree is that I think more poverty is structural, i.e. that not only is it unrelated to desert, but it’s unrelated to individual characteristics (like disability), and is instead a result of the social and economic networks to which they are connected (and importantly, the parts of society to which they aren’t and can’t be connected). Related to this, I don’t think the UBI needs to be as big in order to make meaningful changes in the long term. If welfare is mostly about completely supporting those who are unable to support themselves due to their personal, internal, innocent failures or inability, then you’re right that a UBI that replaces welfare must be a living wage. If welfare is instead mostly about correcting for structural problems that leave average-potential individuals without the access or connections that would allow them to support themselves, then a much lower UBI will make a meaningful difference. In the latter case, it’s not just about how much money is given to the individual, but about how much money is available in a person’s community, in a person’s family, in a person’s network. Increasing the income at every node, even relatively slightly, should have a significant effect on the network. The goal isn’t to fully support most welfare recipients, but to affect the structural barriers to them supporting themselves.
And, unlike the AEI study, I wouldn’t advocate for eliminating all welfare programs and replacing them with a UBI. Welfare programs for the mentally and physically disabled, in particular, would probably still be necessary. But there, where the payout is as much as 50x what the UBI is paying out, the administrative overhead is likely justified.
I hope this helps to clarify our disagreement, and let me know if I’ve misinterpreted your position or reasons.
A few other quick points that I think are worth responding to:
I agree that this information is a little hidden, but this is from their administrative costs calculation page: “Assuming a $15/metric ton fee in Year 1 and a $10 increase each year thereafter, the carbon fee total grows from $79 billion in Year 1 to $544 billion in Year 20.”
The $3,000 figure is already adjusted for cost of living, so that difference should already be factored in. From the press release: “Estimates of household income are expressed in international dollars, created using the World Bank’s individual consumption PPP conversion factor, making income estimates comparable across all 131 countries.”
Because I don’t think the UBI should be a fixed value or come from a specific source. I think implementing a UBI will make many welfare programs unnecessary, and in those cases the other programs should be cut. And there are a lot of unrelated government programs that I would be happy to cut if we think that taxation is too high in general. But I think that it’s worthwhile for the government to levy taxes for the purpose of paying everyone a UBI, that a UBI will help to make a better society and it’s a sound policy. If we were designing a government from scratch, I’d suggest some level of UBI. What tradeoffs we make in practice are important, but they’re a bit besides the point of whether the policy is generally valuable.
And I’m not sure what the optimal value is for the UBI, but it probably isn’t a fixed rate. One of UBI’s strengths is that it scales well as the world changes. A UBI that makes sense or would be affordable now may be too little in a few years, as automation eliminates the possibility of employing larger and larger swaths of the human population, and a living or nearly-living UBI actually becomes necessary.
This isn’t true where the revenue that comes in from the carbon tax is paid out equally. Carbon use is likely to be somewhat correlated with wealth, so that the wealthy tend to get back less from the UBI than they pay in, and the poor are likely to get back more. The cost of goods will indeed increase somewhat, but the difference between carbon expenditures and UBI payouts is likely to be enough to more than compensate the very poor.
Carleas, the system you proposed omits entirely the idea that taxation can alter temperatures. In fact you straight up deny that it can, saying that whereas conditions wont improve, people can be compensated for that. Yes, after having paid for the dispensation themselves.
Case closed then - the Paris Climate Deal has literally nothing to do with climate change, and everything and only with capturing private wealth into a government system, that promises to give it away again. And we know so well what government promises about government generosity are worth.
Trump just preferred to not make promises but straight up save the US $3.000.000.000.000,-. I suppose there are ways in which one can pretend to get angry over this. There are always ways to pretend.
First, climate change isn’t just about temperature change. Indeed, there’s reason to think that climate change will trigger an ice age by disrupting the currents that move warm air and water from the equator towards the poles. But climate change is more about large scale changes to the planetary system, that may result in flooding and other physical destruction, as well as mass die-offs of animals and plants that humans value.
Second, if carbon production affects climate change, and taxation affects carbon production, then taxation affects climate change.