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Comment by craftyguy | Hacker News Reader

At a cost of $24 trillion? Ha!

250m[1] * $1000 * 8 * 12 = $24,000,000,000,000

1. http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat...

Don't forget that that money will also be spent on things, it doesn't just disappear, probably at least half of it comes back right where it came from while in the meantime making sure that those people in the USA that are currently living by third world standards are maybe getting closer to BRIC level of life.

There are already quite some levels of welfare here in the US, including food stamps, government healthcare, housing allowance, and welfare money. You’re much better off being poor in he US than the countries in your acronym.

If everyone's being paid $1000 per month more, you'd expect all jobs to pay less, and the profits from companies used to pay for it.

So then essentially everyone would make the same they are now; thus resulting in little to no-change.

When it's all said and done, having a $1000/m basic income would be little different than increasing the minimum wage by the same amount.

That's not even close to true, because increasing the minimum wage 1) only affects people who have jobs 2) will cause some of those people to lose their jobs. $1000/m basic income is a vastly better solution because everyone at the bottom will be helped.

There's nowhere near 100% employment. The whole point of this is to bring everyone up and make the social care system simpler.

Except employers pay less, which would help make them stop complaining about wages costing too much.

If you increase taxation at the top ranges (and close loopholes the very rich and their corporate personas use to evade taxes and so on) you'll end up just injecting those trillions back into the economy.

If you use that to replace means-tested aid, you get rid of the management overhead.

And, maybe, if the US cuts costs for the military, making them build roads and schools instead of bombing them, you'll realize you really didn't need to spend that much in the military anyway...

There is also an important point in terms of opportunities lost due to low surplus. As you reduce the pressure on the poor, they will end up making better decisions (http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-rese...) with better overall outcomes.

The entire US military budget is only $0.6T, or $4.8T over the relevant 8 years.

It had already been cut via sequestration under Obama (although ironically the Republicans were more to blame for this in my opinion). Couldn't cut much more than that without doing something to improve efficiency. Looks like that isn't going to last under the current administration though, I would be surprised if we end up with a much larger military budget.

> you'll end up just injecting those trillions back into the economy.

Right; that is, whichever economy those rich folks choose to call home. :)

There's been studies that found the rich don't leave a place due to taxes.

I.E. California has one of the biggest economies in the world...

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2011/02/documents/...

Makes sense, if you’re already wealthy then you pick where to live based on where you want to live. Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap, I’d imagine they’d rather solve that by making more money.

Plus it’s not like US citizens have much choice, they have to pay the IRS no matter where you live in the world forever. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide haha.

> Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap

Depends on the total amount of taxes paid. Some people dodge a couple billion every year by doing some clever tricks with their residence, citizenship and tax domicile.

Not if you're a US citizen :) even renouncing forces you to pay taxes to the IRS on your way out the door (the expatriation tax: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...)

You do. Your companies not so much.

The way I like to think about it is this:

Kansas has low taxes, but no one's dying to move there.

Haha exactly.

State and local taxes won't be deductible from federal taxes under the new Trump tax plan.

The story is going to be rather different in that situation, I would bet.

Well, the rich generally leave a place due to what season it is.

And, if you manage to never spend more than half a year on any single place, you can always claim you don't live on any of them.

Yeah ok. I call BS. Let's see all these millionaires move to Jersey (the island), or the Cayman Islands.

Then create laws to tax their money where it's earned.

The first rule of UBI is you don’t talk about how to pay for it.

Nah, it's taxes. Pretty transparent really. They want to raise taxes and stimulate the economy instead of the opposite which has never ever worked.

What's the 8 for?

250m * 1000 * 12 = $3 trillion.

The original growth number is over 8 years

The 8 years that the growth in the headline takes.

The authors are fools. Would the money just picked from the money tree? Increasing the money supply supply would result in an increase in housing inflation, just as it has now.

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