A Democrat is running for president on a platform of Universal Basic Income

1. Issue bonuses at end of 2017, push out tax obligation into 2018 2. Mush into newer, much lower tax rate

There is a reason they chose to issue bonuses and not raises.

Everybody currently aged between 18-64 who is not living in poverty or is unemployed is already receiving that amount of money (or more) from her/his employer.

Hence, as a cheap palor trick you could just relabel part of the paycheck as UBI (so the money is there). In addition, you could then subsume most social services inside a flat amount, saving money in admin overhead.

The hypothetical counter argument is that lots of people would not work if given UBI. This has been shown to be false when tested. Also, social services in Germany and many Scandinavian countries are not that far off and these countries do not have 50%+ unemployment.

While the middle class got something, the majority went to the wealthy, and as per my previous comment on shares, they are not going to be flooding it back into the economy.

Also US corporate taxes were about median for the world, they were not absurdly high, you should check out some countries in Europe for that.

A lot of the negative press the tax reform got was based on a lot of highly ambitious parts that fortunately didn't make it into the final bill.

That won't do it. $1,000 a month for every working age adult would cost over $2 trillion a year. That is roughly equal to what the Federal government spends on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense combined. There is no way this plan can ever be cost neutral. For it to even be financially feasible it would need to come with a rewriting of the entire Federal tax system and budget (which would probably be a good thing, but it would be a political impossibility at this point).

Person A makes 20k, person B makes 10k. Both work pretty shitty jobs -- I wouldn't want either.. Both work the same hours. No more jobs exist for Person A's job, so Person B couldn't rise up to their level if they wanted to.

GBI works because everybody gets it -- so nobody feels like they're getting special treatment, nobody feels like they're on welfare (which causes a mental stigma to begin with) and the goal is simply to cover average rents and maybe some food. Everyone should have food and a roof.

Your plan also doesn't account for what happens when all the jobs for both A and B close down because of automation which is the whole point for why we're discussing GBI more and more anyways.

I'm a web developer, and learning ml/ai so I can automate myself out of one of the last existing careers.

We can move to a post-scarcity world where all menial tasks are done by collectives of robots who work for all mankind... it is possible and would be cool, I just don't know how we begin to get there.

By the way most academics/economists agree that in 12 years there will be a minimum of 40% of the current jobs gone. Not replaced by new jobs in ai/ml - completely just gone. As in those 40% of people have no use for society at all.

Look, we're entering a period of history where the number of tasks requiring human labor will only keep decreasing. This will lead to a growing class of people for whom the labor market cannot provide a basic standard of living.

If a stronger welfare state isn't the answer to that problem, I've yet to hear what is, exactly.

People to cut the crops, people to harvest lax, people to spin wool, people to weave cloth, people to make soap, street cleaners, navvies, telephone operators, travel agents, and the list goes on.

Sure, there are still people who do all of those, but not like it used to be.

And this transition, that is, the use of automation to increase the power of capital by decreasing the cost of labor, is what lead to the original ideas of full communism.

I'm also for single-payer because we spend too much on Sales/Commercials/CEOS for insurance companies, and medical billers who we could all put out of jobs because all they do is figure out how to pay hospitals and collect money from us or our employers.

I feel though that trickle-down has failed immensely. The fact is trickle-out is what happened trickle-out-to-my-caymen-island-account.

Rich just re-invest/hoard money. Now if they'd trickled up... it would've worked wonders for the economy. Give the poorest of the poor money --and they'll spend it on booze/drugs/homes/food does it matter? The money still circulates and finds it way back up to the rich/b2c businesses.

$10k given to Bill Gates goes into the bank account, and stays their collecting dust and interest. $10k given to a struggling family goes into a new car, or braces for Jimmy, etc... Which in turn goes to payroll for employees at the dentist or car-lot, and that goes on and on...