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Comment by xedrac | Hacker News Reader

I think you hit on one of the biggest risks in my opinion. Right now there is a strong motive to educate yourself, because it will likely result in a more comfortable future. Having a highly educated population is hugely beneficial. I suppose if UBI provided just enough to keep you alive, then it might not be so bad.

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Mathematically, I can't imagine we could fund a UBI scheme that would even barely keep you housed and fed.

At $1500/mo for everyone in the US, that comes to just shy of 6 trillion USD. For comparison, the total federal tax revenues for 2016 are going to be approximately 3.5 trillion USD, including payroll taxes.

At $1500/mo/person, this one program would present 5/3rds of all federal tax revenues.

A more realistic figure is probably much closer to $650/mo, assuming you take ALL of the current federal spending on healthcare, social security, veteran's benefits, pensions, and welfare and direct it into UBI. This says nothing of the legality of cancelling existing or contractually promised federal pensions, nor the morality/practicality of changing the existing social security and Medicare systems, of course.

$650/mo/person still leaves us with a deficit (as today) and is a pretty meager existence for sure!

UBI isn't black hole spending like the military. A lot of money is moving through the fed in taxes but that money isn't going into a black hole or having a huge inefficiency quotient taken out of it, the vast majority of UBI checks will be immediately spent and recirculated without any overhead.

It is undeniably true that the majority of UBI checks will be spent as "fast money".

Nevertheless, the money is going to come from somewhere and that somewhere is taxes. It would be unreasonable to not calculate the total sum of taxes required for various levels of UBI funding, IMO.

It depends on how you phrase it. If you treat it like an expense, people will balk at the proposal as unreasonable. And while a lot of tax revenue ends up being wasted and becomes effectively an expense, 6 trillion taxed to maintain a $1500/month UBI for all adults is not going to slow the economy the way 500Bn for the military does. At worst, the wealthy are getting a fraction of their tax money back in their UBI check and putting it right back where the tax revenue came from - investment accounts.

It is the same way infrastructure investment works. Nobody wants to do it because the upfront bill looks big. But the decades long projection of efficiency of most high-demand projects would eclipse the cost by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile special interests (mainly those who would not immediately benefit from the infrastructure themselves) keep phrasing the conversation around "how much it will cost" these projects never get done, and the national economy suffers as a whole for it.

Are you prepared to double current taxes?

If not, you need to plan spend less than double what you're currently spending.

It's not just education. Somebody who didn't get out of bed before noon until he was 30 will probably never be able to hold down a job.

This is the reason I think UBI will be disastrous, but it's going to take a generation or two for the rot to set in.

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