Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two.
It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.
It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.
People in the US need to let go of a lot of the ideas we cling to (taxing the rich slows the economy, UBI is communism, wealth redistribution == USSR) if we're going to live through the coming automation boom.
Health care is tougher, due to stricter regulations (rightly so) and reluctance from doctors but I think the transformation there is about to begin. Look at what is happening with (open source) prosthetics.
Prime reason for rent and mortgage that I can see is wealth generation and in a society where wealth is less important perhaps these will also decrease. You can see more and more interest in open source, not just in software but also other fields, is this a shift away from wealth accumulation?
From another angle, people are beginning build homes with recycled plastic and by 3D printing this hopefully will reduce build cost. And hopefully that will filter down to the end consumer.
Current US population: 324 million people, 250 million adults.
Poverty line income: $22,000 for the family of four (it is hard to estimate individual poverty line income, but it's more than $22,000 / 4. Let's say $12,000, which is $1000 / month).
Total cost of universal basic income of $1,000/month for the US: $3 trillion per year.
Total US income tax revenue: $1.8 trillion for personal income tax, $0.4 trillion for corporate income tax.
For instance, if the cost of "basic life necessities" was somehow $5/yr, but incomes (and tax revenues) similar to today (... presumably people are spending an awful lot on luxury goods?), it could certainly be all three of those things.
It may be the case that that is somehow impossible, but that's a case that you need to make in some way other than listing off what the current numbers happen to be.
Everyone gets the UBI, but the more money you make, the more you're paying in additional taxes to support the UBI. At some threshold you're paying as much in additional taxes as your making in UBI payments. Past another threshold and you're paying more in additional taxes than you're taking in.
Effectively you only need to provide the full UBI for people making very little per month.
That might or might not be the case depending on the behavior of the people but given that universal basic income proponents argue that people would not get lazy and exploit the system I am happy to make that assumption. In case that turns out to be false, it is certainly possible to tweak the scheme in such a way that there remains an incentive not to become lazy, for example by lowering the 100 % tax rate but still keeping it high.
Even if that were enough people, you also remove economic feedback about the effectiveness of peoples' actions. That feedback is critical for an economy to efficiently allocate resources.
You can try to tweak the incentive structure here and there to make it unlikely that you will end up in the worst case scenario but you can not really get rid of it. Unless you advance technology and automation to the point where you can provide for basic needs without any labor at all, a universal basic income scheme is a promise you can not keep unconditionally.
I mean, of course the scheme will fail if everyone stops working. But if not enough people are working to make enough stuff to satisfy demand, you'll see inflation, the BI will fall below someone's comfort level, and they'll get to work. This assumes you don't peg the BI to actual or expected inflation - don't do that!
(Another way of phrasing this - In theory a scheme can be unconditional in nominal terms while allowed to float in real terms, and ideally the feedback will allow us to keep real value distributed at some optimal level based on what society can bear. Whether that can translate into practice is an open question.)
In reality, I guess, people would just overthrow your shitty system or circumvent it with black markets. So after thinking a bit longer about this, the requirements given in the initial comment seem not to be as straight forward as they may appear at first. What does sustainable mean? Is it sustainable if we make use of hunger to convince people to work? Is it implementable at the current population level if it entails something that the current population would never accept, say for ideological or religious reasons?
Free-rider problem, and the black (or gray) market.
If all the value I capture from working is one/population of the value I produce, there are probably other things I can do (in an environment with a population bigger than "really small village") that will do substantially more to improve my circumstances, whether legal or not (and some things are bound to be legal - consider a kind of analog of the "man who marries his housekeeper" objection to GDP). And when people are desperate, they are more likely to focus on the things that will most improve their circumstance (especially in the shortest term).
The unconditional in unconditional basic income has a softer meaning than you use; it mostly just means that the payments are made regardless of wealth and other income (of course in a large number of cases it would also be completely recovered by taxation).
In fact, most of the productivity increases are in industries where the value produced is not directly coupled to the resourced consumed. The software industry is a great example.
If production is not limited, then we can instantly transform our solar system into a Dyson sphere, right now. What am I not understanding, of this theory?
To produce a two ton truck, you need to use more than two tons of resource, that much is obvious. But how many resources go into the production of my copy of GTAV? Or my blue-ray of The Lord of the Rings? Or my viewing of a show on Netflix? The marginal resource usage is pretty much nil, just some electricity, paper of plastic. The resources expended in producing the work itself can be significant, but they are amortized among the many millions of copies.
Now obviously there are limits. Humans need physical stuff to survive, that's not going to change any time soon. There's a limit on the amount of actual stuff we can make. But there's no clear limit on the value of that stuff. We keep finding new ways to make little pieces of plastic or bunches of electrons in wires valuable all the time.
Those limits are constantly being pushed outwards, but they are not disappearing. Eventually, we might have cities and data centers covering the entire Earth, à la Coruscant. At that point, we will still be constrained by our ability to cool the system, by our ability to efficiently power it all with minimal waste heat, and by the speed of communications through congested networks.
That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Corollary: accounting of costs, prices, and values is badly flawed.
Thermodynamics does not address value.
You might also want to consider Georgescu-Roegen.
There are two ways you can get that though:
1. You can harvest current-cycle solar, as captured or availed by PV, solar thermal, wind, hydro, (pipe dream / ineffective) wave energy, or biomass.
2. You can draw down an existing store of solar energy input deposited, with some inefficiency, as hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil, gas (including methane hydrates, should you choose to go there).[2]
The difference is that in 1) you're deriving value from a continuing series of deposits, of approximately 84 terawatts,[3] or roughly 2,000 TWh (170 billion mtoe, 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent), an allowance shared with all other life-forms, and ecological / biospheric processes on the planet (we might care to consider those requirements before hiving of yet more for ourselves). The practical value derived remains a small fraction of the influx.
In the case of 2), you're spending down what is effectively an inheritance, at the rate of approximately 5 million times its initial rate of accumulation. This suggests that the spending-down is not particularly sustainable, even barring consideration of any other issues presented.
Of which I'm informed there are several.
The point remains that as you process that energy chain, each stage of the process leaves less useful or usable energy going out than came in, the balance being waste energy (entropy).
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Notes:
1. There's a very small contribution from non-solar sources, principally geothermal energy, a roughly 50-50 mix of gravitational potential energy of formation and radioactive decay, which could be considered sourced from the supernovae which enabled formation of the Solar System.
2. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1....
The 2015 average income per capita was $57,540 [0]. The 2015 poverty guideline for a family of five was $28,410 [1]. Clearly there is more income per capita than required to keep everybody out of poverty.
A second source, the Census, is pretty reputable too: "Median household income in the United States was $56,516 in 2015." [2] Edit: This statement isn't helpful since it is a median, not a mean. A better source from the Census is [3], which lists the mean average as $75,738. As a reply pointed out, the heavy income inequality in the USA is expected to cause this sort of skew in the median.
Either way, I propose that taking everybody's income away and then splitting it evenly would apportion enough money to keep everybody out of poverty, that it would be sustainable (based on trends of past amounts of income per capita and poverty guidelines), and that it would clear the poverty guideline, a well-known bright line for "basic life necessities."
Is this a good solution? Maybe. There's probably better ones. But they do exist.
Edit: Specifically, would this system remain stable? It's hard to say. We can imagine that anybody on the sad side of the Pareto curve, which is a majority of the typical employed people in the USA, would not mind effectively having a big check from Uncle Sam raising their income to healthy levels. At the same time, we could also imagine that the wealthy few who are hit hardest in this scheme would try to find some way to get their income to be non-taxable, whether by lobbying for a proportional tax or inventing new capital transfer techniques. I'm not going to claim that this scheme is in any way socially workable over the long term, though. I personally feel that any UBI scheme is still socially unworkable; we need more small-scale evidence that UBI works.
Still edit: As an example, imagine that the UBI payments were only sufficient to bring the impoverished up out of poverty, and not necessarily any higher. That means that over half of the income marked in my original scheme would not be needed, so the wealthy could keep it. This would effectively be a two-tax-bracket system, with the brackets labeled "below" and "above." Does it still work on paper? Yes. Do I think that people will like it? No. Do I think that people like taxes? Not really.
[0] http://data.worldbank.org/country/United-States
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...
[3] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2015/demo/cps/hinc-06.htm... (Warning: XLS sheet!)
For your convenience: US Gini index is ~41%, and, correspondingly, the alpha parameter of Lomax (Pareto type II) distribution is ~1.71. If you plug the median in [1], and try to run any income redistribution scenarios, it doesn't work.
Peoples' behavior is not a constant. When you change the incentives, the behavior changes. This is one aspect of the "Law of Unintended Consequences" that has wrecked so many fine-sounding ideas.