I figure UBI will look like it's succeeding for ~10-20 years, then we'll see what the real impact of it is (as people grow up with it). There's also little consensus on how comfortable the basic income should be; I get the impression that if it is too comfortable, you'd be a fool to work, if it's too uncomfortable, the bleeding hearts will call everyone a nazi until it's made too comfortable.
Some people will sit on their asses and never work a single day but the majority of the population would keep working. The extra money would become meaningless because prices would adjust to accommodate it.
We have to keep in mind that you can't just create money and hand it out and make everyone rich. If everyone had 10x as much money prices would end up going up 10x. The supply of real goods you can use that money for hasn't changed. The huge increase in demand would lead to a supply crunch and much higher prices.
The money we're giving out for UBI has to be taken from someone else. What UBI is calling for is wealth redistribution, something I'm in favor of. But people seem to think it's magic around here.
If we pillaged the top 1% and distributed their wealth evenly the entire rest of the population would get close to a 100% raise. That's how filthy rich the top 1% are.
That's not actually supported in the literature.
But in any case, you don't have to inflate to have UBI. Just tax money a bit when it gets distributed to shareholders.
Well, that would factor in as a depression of dividends for all stocks; that would only reduce the value of holding stocks, sounds like it would backfire tremendously. Then you have the issue of whether or not to tax dividends to foreign-held stocks: if you tax disbursements, it would compound some countries' taxes and ultimately reduce the value of holding american stocks; if you don't tax foreign disbursements, then the people you're looking to tax would set up their holdings somewhere without a dividend tax.
I'm wondering how you think this could work.
So the tax on dividends would just serve to cover the gap, not the full amount.
[1] For example, the CPI tracks "owner's equivalent of rent" instead of raw housing prices https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheet-owners-equivalent-rent-and...
No. This is one of the pitfalls of economics: overly simplistic models that don't (can't) properly account for external factors, and assume everyone has perfect information and behaves rationally.
The real world does not work that way.
This is why UBI is wealth distribution. Too keep the UBI money from being worthless it can't be printed money, it needs to be money taken from someone else.
The problem with this, of course, is that the rich would simply leave. They are the most attractive to rob, and the best prepared to escape.
In addition, "the 1%" is not an exclusive club; most people (currently) have a pretty good chance of entering the 1% at some point in their life, most in the 1% have a very good chance of exiting it.
I beg your pardon?
You can't be serious. Social mobility (to the extent it ever existed) is way down over the past 40 years, and there's no sign of that trend reversing.
http://www.aei.org/publication/evidence-shows-significant-in...
How could there possibly be so many jobs that offer that kind of income. Or maybe it's that most jobs offering high income have short tenure..
Confiscating the assets of the 1% to create economic prosperity has been tried a few times before, and usually turns out horribly in ten years. You've removed the people who risk their own money from society, and replaced it with only assest allocation by bureaucrats.
Plus, as soon as you removed the one percent, then you have a new one percent.
See Dekulakization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
As much as many of the 1% don't deserve it... A lot of them have that much money for a reason. The ones I knew, the "new money", were generally extremely intelligent and hard working before they made their millions. A lot of them are on permanent vacation now but if all of us had that much brains, charm, and grit it would be a lot easier to get rich.
Don't forget that sometimes luck is a big part of the reason why some of those people are successful.
With that, you can then reduce the taxes for the lower economic classes, and fund better infrastructure and education.
It looks like this is the source for the claims: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
This is what the paper says: "Total family income is the measuring stick used to determine levels of affluence achieved. This is defined as taxable income of head of household and spouse, taxable income of other family members of the household, and transfer income of head, spouse, and others."
Based on what I know about US tax, you don't have to pay taxes on the first $500k in gains for your primary house (if married), and inheritances usually aren't considered taxable income.
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/capital-gains-and-your... https://www.hrblock.com/get-answers/taxes/income/is-your-inh...
The rich can leave, but the profits their companies generate locally can still be taxed. And they can be taxed more when the money gets sent to wherever those rich people went to.
Surely at some modest level UBI is likely to greatly benefit the bottom (who will likely immediately inject the money into the economy). As with anything in life, yes, people will argue over it. That's probably a good thing.
IMO, long cycles in pay (weeks or a month) are suboptimal. If the money streamed in continuously, slowly, then it would only "run out" for a matter of minutes, although it would still take a while for a useful amount of it to re-accumulate.