The passage should read more like: "Unfortunately, we couldn't make the time. To provide a meaningful amount of acknowledgment of existence to the working middle class, you'd have to signal an enormous amount of disloyalty to your corporate donors, and that would mean actually going to the midwest and cannibalizing time spent promising right wing policies to rich suburban Republicans. We decided it was exciting but not necessary. We raised over a billion dollars and can just buy our way through the general election."
Basically, the argument is that you'll never raise taxes in the USA, so if you want to help the poor, you have to target the poor, not give half that money to rich people. If you're unable to raise taxes, which you very likely won't be able to, then you just end up taking money away from the poor.
If you can raise taxes, you can rebalance the money given to the rich with a progressive tax making it essentially a Negative Income Tax AKA Mincome [2], but again it whether you'd be able to do it or not is a different question.
[1] https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal-basi...
1.) College 2.) Healthcare 3.) Abortion 4.) UBI
Why not just throw the entire enchilada out there and just have them pay for everything? If giving people money allows for economic growth, then wouldn't it make sense to just give everyone unlimited amount of money. Why stop at X when you can go for Y.
> I'm running out of things that the progressives want the government to pay for without any logic and mathematics behind it
The logic behind the first three as presented is "most countries already do this," along with the implication (justified, in my opinion) that it works out well for their citizens.
So why wouldn't it be the same in the USA? Is our government uniquely incapable of this? Is it that the model of these other countries is unsustainable? Is it that we have a huge propaganda machine in place that is convincing many of our citizens to conclude without serious and informed consideration that it shouldn't be the role of our government to provide these things? Or is it some other option?
Developing nations can afford to create such programs, and run them successfully without harming themselves.
Surely the US is mathematically, and logically, capable of providing such services?
Like the state of Endless War? https://theintercept.com/2017/09/13/the-clinton-book-tour-is...
If I had my druthers I'd like to see the "defense" budget halved--I don't understand what $600 billion of military spending gets us over $300 billion, and Ron Paul, a libertarian, ran on that very platform. It's okay to say that $300B isn't enough to cover the costs of UBI, but it's a damn sight closer to meeting that threshold, and in my opinion it would result in a lot less blowback (read: future excuses for more military spending). This is something that is still essentially off the table amongst mainstream political discourse, and that is a problem.
Progressive taxation works primarily because those with broad shoulders contribute the most. Individuals contributing more to government income at the individual level does not have the same results, primarily because the benefits of higher taxation can only be realised if the policy is universally applied.
Of course a policy universally applied will be more effective, but its silly to say its what people want. If people want to give more, they can.
>I can easily afford more taxes. I don't mind paying my taxes
That person's argument is "I don't mind" and therefore taxes should be increased. My point is that just because that individual commenter doesn't mind, that doesn't generalize to everyone else who would be paying more in taxes.
In other words "I don't mind paying more" is an argument for you to pay more taxes. It's not an argument for me to pay more taxes, because I do mind. My comment is trying to raise this idea, albeit in a somewhat flip way.
The entire premise of UBI is counter productive as it is. We can act like the differ but we all know that people will simply drop out of the work force when they don't have to work.
Wouldn't this be a solution to any third world country is to simply supply a UBI to its citizens? Why wouldn't Venezuela do this if it was so great?
Such a big risk to attempt that ignores economics 101.
What it's spent on is another matter entirely.
I can't speak for Venezuala as I don't live there. I doubt they have a GDP great enough to be very effective in these regards.
Yes, this is the entire point of tax brackets.
> So at what point is enough enough When they pay more.
If you're curious, you can even donate money to the government. In my case, I like donating to NASA. However, you can't earmark the funds, they have to go into NASA's general account.