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A big thing not really detailed, but briefly mentioned here, is presumably a lot of social services like CalFresh and CalWORKS would presumably be scrapped in exchange. Instead of having a bunch of different support systems for poor people with all of the administrative overhead that comes with it, you'd just issue people money, and get a lot of it back in taxes.

Note that Amazon has to charge state sales tax these days too, as do many other online retailers. So "buying out of state" is going to be pretty hard. People's eBay or Craigslist game might get interesting though with the new margins.

As much as California is one of the few states that might be progressive enough to attempt this, it'd be far better if a less populated (and smaller) state attempted UBI first. If Montana torches it's economy, it's probably a lot easier to reassemble than California's.

I'm skeptical of that. Scrapping those programs means scrapping the jobs of the state employees that run them. I don't think the state politicans want responsibility for that.

Well, presumably as many people as you needed to administrate this program could be taken from the old programs you'd scrap. But worst case, any state employee jobs you lost are still getting $1,000 a month.

I think the California State Employees Association would have something to say about their members’ total comp decreased from ~six figures to 12k/year.

The ones making that much money would certainly be able to find other jobs making similar amounts, elsewhere; and it would be good that they had this safety net, hopefully with medicare for all too.

I doubt the average lifetime bureaucrat can find such employment. Regardless, I don’t think the union will let the state ever put them in the position to need to try.

I have a feeling Montana would be less keen to torch its economy than we are to have them be our petri dish.

One nice thing about California's economy is that it's robust. There's probably enough economic activity that this wouldn't totally fuck us, but the ramifications are surely much stronger than the legislator who threw this together has considered.

I'm in neither state, so either petri dish is informative to me. :)

"The bill would authorize the department to adopt regulations to implement the program" makes it kinda sound a bit like a Brexit vote, in that the bill is really only meant to get everyone to vote to agree to do it, and then the precise details of how you'd actually implement it would be attended to later.

I would say don't presume that. Presume instead that this program will not supplant other programs and it will not be universal.

UBI is a popular idea, but the way you see it isn't the popular version of it, at least in California. I only know this because I had the same misconception.

It's not very clear to me how ""buying out of state" is going to be pretty hard."

I suppose by this you mean that the Californian is going to pay a higher price for out-of-state purchases compared to if they were based outside of California?

>My first thought: can this possibly be solvent? There are apx. 32 million adults in California. Are there $32 billion spent per month in-state on things that aren't those common categories?

I'd be curious to see a way of doing this that didn't depend on the arbitrary "X dollars per month" stipulation and was instead just "we're putting in this tax, whatever we pull in each month will be evenly split among the citizens". If nothing else, it would allow us to get our feet wet with UBI without people worrying about it not being financially feasible.

And instead of a general VAT, which impacts all trade negatively. Make it a carbon tax, a consumption that actually needs to be more expensive.

California's GDP is $2.75 trillion, or $229 billion monthly.

Giving each adult $1k costs $32 billion a month.

Assuming none of GDP is attributable to the exclusions, the program seems mostly possible, at a cursory glance. Not fully funded, but reasonably close to fully funded.

The state currently spends $220 billion a year. This program would be a substantial increase to the state's expenditures, more than doubling them.

I think it's $320 billion spent per month.

($320 billion x 10% vat = $32 billion revenue / 32 million people = $1000 per person per month)

That just over $3.8 trillion per year of California spending that needs to be taxed at 10%.

Yes, the California economy could absorb an additional $32B in additional taxes if that money is then just re-routed back into consumers' pockets via a UBI.

So the overall tax impact isn't my concern.

My concern is why do this at all if just routes money through the state treasury then back into consumers' pockets?

Unless, the UBI is highly distributive,taking money from the well-to-do and giving it to the poor.

But...if it's highly re-distribute then that will incentivize the rich to leave the state and incentivize the poor to come, over time that's not sustainable.

Having said all this, I still 100% support the idea behind a UBI, I just don't think we're ready to implement on a national level much less a state level.

> Unless, the UBI is highly distributive,taking money from the well-to-do and giving it to the poor.

s/highly distributive,taking money from the well-to-do and giving it to the poor/Forced wealth redistribution

Yes, correct, forced wealth redistribution. Similar to tax dollars going to defense contractors, teachers, farmers, the elderly and medicare. The federal government is in the business of forced wealth distribution.

taxation is the backbone of most if not all governments, no argument there and most rational people would agree, but the foaming in the mouth "blame the wealthy for all the ills facing the world and go for their bone marrow" is what I'm totally against YMMMV. At some point you run out of the billionaires and guess who is next in line to get strip mined in the form of additional taxes? the middle class and finally the poor.

Wouldn't this just leverage the existing sales tax system? Now that local sales taxes are collected nationwide, it would be much harder to avoid.

Value-added tax means it's baked into the purchase price.

Buy a $5.50 cup of coffee? You get charged $5.98 (after the existing 8.75% sales tax) and the merchant gets $5 (because 10% of the advertised price is VAT).

> Then I realized that this includes business purchases.

That's not how VAT works in any country I'm aware of. As a freelancer I don't pay VAT for any expenses. Practically, companies often pay VAT and collect it from their customers for the government. But if they pay more then they collect they get a refund.

I haven't done the math on this particular case, but I believe it is incorrect to say a UBI program will simply cost number-of-people multiplied by dollar-amount. Income tax would likely go up, too, so top earners will likely "give back" that dollar amount they received in UBI when they pay their taxes.

Did you read the bill? It says right in there that it's funded by a 10% VAT.

I can't tell if you're hypothesizing about future taxes or just didn't read the bill.

It doesn't matter if it's solvent or not. Once it's implemented and people are dependent on it, it has to work going forward, and people will pass whatever laws necessary to ensure that it doesn't fail.

It is possible to run out of other peoples' money.

Not according to this website: https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Why don't they just pay people to leave so they don't have to build any housing?

They’d rather create an inhospitable environment for people and businesses that will cause a net out migration

CA already has net out migration. Which, IMHO, is a good thing until it is too large.

Still positive population growth, though.