AB2712 – California Universal Basic Income
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes.
Now, assuming the most generous interpretation of their 10% VAT proposal... which means a 10% VAT on things like rent, transportation, etc. CA has around 11.5mil households with apx $40k/household of spending, which yields $460bil @ 10% => $46bil in additional tax revenue.
This won't work. It's just meaningless hot hair.
Schools. Roads. Sewers. Water. Clean air. Power. Safety. Just to name a few.
Nothing important really.
Edit: before you jump into the “other means funding” - I lived (and owned house) in WA and CA and the overall tax burden is MUCH higher in CA
CA somehow manages to waste a lot of money. SF has city budgets higher than some states and still says it needs more money.
Florida has the lowest in-state tuition in the country.[2] This includes UF, ranked as the seventh-best public university, at an average of $6300.(UC Berkeley averages $14,000.) 39% of Florida college students pay zero tuition.
Florida has the second highest quality roads in the union[3]. It's consumer electricity prices are nearly 50% lower than California.[4]
Florida has no state income tax, relatively modest property taxes, and a 7% sales tax. Nor does it overextend itself fiscally to provide high-quality government services on a low tax base. It ranks second in the union for state fiscal health.[5]. (California, even in the midst of the greatest tech boom in history ranks 42nd.)
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/26/9617514/test-scores-naep-2013 [2] https://www.valuepenguin.com/student-loans/average-cost-of-c... [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/08/states-that-... [4] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ [5] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/fiscal-stab...
They have different needs which are met with different tax burdens. If you want the luxury of living in CA, then you need to pay your share.
- I live in the Bay Area, we largely have some of the worst schools on average. Yes some areas are perfect but the majority you don't want your kid going to.
- Roads? What roads? The roads that are over-congested? The roads that have potholes that are measured in feet deep?
- Power, water, clean air? Surely some of that is covered in the fees I already pay for? I pay some of the highest water/sewer/electric rates in the country.
- Safety? I have a statistically higher chance of getting mugged in the Bay Area then most other parts of the country. I have lived in Oakland and San Francisco for a decade. I never see police but have seen lots of crime.
Again, I ask, what for? I already pay some of the highest tax rates here. My property tax is expensive, my income tax is high. I get very little back from the state. Why would I trust the state to mishandle even more money?
You're paying high taxes because they can tax you that highly and you haven't moved away yet. When they increase them and you still don't move their take away will be that they can probably raise them even higher.
You're the sucker here.
Also, feet-deep pot-holes? So how many cars are bottoming out each week?
California's tax burden is ~9%, and within 1% of the median: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
You don't have to tell me about Prop 13, its a joke and I push to remove it as often as I can.
You live in the most expensive real-estate in the country and complain that it costs money to maintain.
Pay your fair share.
My complaint is that I pay some of the highest taxes in the country for some of the lowest benefits.
Not sure what this has to do with me paying my fair share?
And my argument is that you are undervaluing the cost of the benefits it provides.
Particularly in a cosmopolitan city, there are layers upon layers of infrastructure and society which need to be supported. Here you are standing on top of it all complaining about the breeze.
Paying your fair share is recognizing that you are in a position of privilege and giving back those who allow you to be there. The system depends on people like you to strengthen the ladder you used to climb up in life, not pull it up behind you.
Instead, we have high sales tax, and high income taxes so that long-time wealthy residents have it easier.
Just one example: http://sfappeal.com/2013/05/arrest-warrants-issued-for-sf-sc...
Note that in the US, Government expenditures on healthcare are higher than in the average EU country, yet a much smaller fraction of the population get government provided healthcare.
It actually makes a lot of sense, because the primary benefit of using income tax is the progressive rate structure, but for a tax funding a UBI you actually want a flat rate because the tax is the de facto phase out of the benefit.
We currently have two systems that basically invert each other. On the one hand, we have a progressive tax. On the other hand, we phase out assistance for the poor as incomes increase. These two things cancel out. With a UBI you "pay more tax" but you don't lose the assistance. When the assistance is cash that's a no-op.
Except that administratively it's dramatically simpler -- you don't have to vary the tax based on how much money anybody makes, you don't create arbitrage opportunities for rich people to pay lower tax rates intended for poor people, you don't accidentally create poverty traps by imposing de facto higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people due to overlapping benefits phase outs, etc.
So, by VAT, maybe they mean a 10% haircut on absolutely everything?
https://www.newsweek.com/new-bill-would-give-nearly-every-ca...
And the relevant bit:
“The program would be paid for with a state value-added tax of 10 percent on goods and services, with exemptions for groceries, medicine, medical supplies, clothing, textbooks and other items. Recipients of several programs, including the state's Medicaid plan, would be ineligible.”
Not to wax too political here, but the insane part to me isn’t even the UBI bit which I’m not fond of but open to changing my view in the coming decades, the insane part is the introduction of a new type of tax we previously didn’t have, and near as I can tell isn’t intended to replace the sales tax, and not just a new tax, but at a pretty high rate.
Actually you know what? I just looked at the bill text, it was less than I thought and it was more insane than I thought. Here’s section 2:
“SEC. 2. It is the intent of the Legislature to fund the CalUBI Program with a value-added tax of 10 percent on goods and services, except medicine, medical supplies and equipment, educational materials, including textbooks, tuition or fees for education, food, groceries, and clothing.”
It is the intent of the legislature to fund it with a VAT, and if you know anything at all about California law, then you probably know that means a ballot measure which will need 2/3 support from the electorate. Theoretically that ballot measure could be used to replace the sales tax, but it probably won’t be because only part of the sales tax is State, and much of it is appropriated by law to fund very specific projects or programs.
Whew ...
That's assuming a fully costed proposal, which this one isn't.
It's easy to throw around FUD. But anything that redistributes wealth from the top 0.1% is the right direction.
No. No, it's not. There are several ways to do it that are very much not the right direction. (See Venezuela for a couterexample.)
Note well: This does not mean that this specific proposal is in the wrong direction (though I suspect it is). I merely mean that "just take it from the 0.1%, it will all work out" is a very inadequate failure mode analysis.
Show me a success story where this didn't become a gigantic suck on the funds
I don't think you can realistically (or ethically) get rid of welfare programs when introducing UBI. This is the issue I had with Andrew Yang's "Freedom Dividend" proposal, too. Some people are bad at managing money or have emergencies $12k won't cover. As a society, we cannot allow them to starve in the street because of this.
But at that rate it should definitely replace all other programs save medical.
I also think VAT plus land ownership tax should be where the bulk should come from. Possibly also a rent-holder's tax for foreign national-owned properties that might be 10%/year of value. It should be household based too. Like perhaps 2,000 for first adult, 1k per adult in house, 500 per child.
To be really ideal it needs to give people the freedom to 'choose' work as something to get 'more' reward. This would put supply of jobs above demand, and drive up wages too. Some would choose to focus on side projects, or art, science, studies, college, etc... Some might just play games all day, but who knows maybe they become e-sports athletes and earn thousands doing that.
I think also though, single payer should come before UBI, not after. I think that should be first since people are dying because of that. I'd like to see states start trying to implement that on their own, maybe it works out great and other states copy them.
That’s $120K/year. Assuming a 33% effective income tax rate, that’s $180k, pre tax, no savings, or expenses for food, etc. That’s well into the 80th percentile income bracket in CA, and it’s probably possible to be in the 90th percentile and still come out ahead (factor in retirement savings, college, etc):
https://statisticalatlas.com/state/California/Household-Inco...
Re-reading your comment, this is probably just another way of saying the math doesn’t work out.
Income or property tax increases are probably necessary.
As with any government tax and benefits program, it is what comes out of committee that will truly matter. VAT taxes usually land harder on the middle class than upper or lower simply because of how people typically spend their income. They are great though at masking the cost of government and increases in the cost and goods of services is more likely to be put upon the provider of each rather than government.
Reducing costs, fines, and fees for required government services and licensing would go a lot further to reducing the burden on the poor, that $36 driving license renewal doesn't look annoying at 120k but at 25k it means something.
The median income in California is $75k, not $40k. On top of that, this is an alternative to existing assistance programs, so you either get to recover the money spent on those or you get to remove the people who continue to receive them from the population receiving the UBI. I'm not saying the numbers for this bill necessarily balance, but you're using the wrong ones.
> They would have to more than double the tax revenue for a state with already very high taxes.
Nominal tax rate with a UBI has to be discounted by the full amount of the UBI, because you're not paying it if you're getting it back. It obviously doesn't hurt you to pay $10,000 more in taxes if you're then receiving a $12,000 UBI.
This confuses the heck out of people because it means that a UBI costs "nothing" -- but that's how it works. It's purely redistributive. It doesn't cost anything on net, it only moves money around. At the individual level, it costs people above the median something, but still not the amount of the tax, only the difference between the UBI and the amount of the tax. The rest they get back.
Which, amazingly, is one of the reasons this could actually pass. California's property class seem to get everything they want, even if it's voting down small and inadequate reforms like SB-50 was (it was a start but not even remotely enough).
California should be thinking about absolutely nothing else that's big except fixing their housing crisis. It's so big at this point that it's actually causing most of the other major problems.
You say the poor tenant will transfer wealth to the wealthy landlord as if the tenant is losing. However -- they are both gaining.
Say the rent is $1000.
Obviously, the property usage right is worth to the landlord less than $1000, otherwise he would've just used the property himself. He gains.
The property usage right is worth more than $1000 to the tenant, otherwise he would've just kept the money. He gains.
Both people gain. Both people get richer. Both people ended up with more than they had prior to the transaction.
To prove an extreme case, if I point a gun at you and say “$1k or I shoot”, you’re likely to pay. You gained not dying, but are you richer? Or did I merely use my power to impose an urgent need on you that you needed to pay for?
I've always wondered if you just took billions from the richest Californians and gave that money to the poorest Californians if the people that had their money taken would actually be better of in the long run.
If you increase the amount and velocity of money going through the economy could it not be possible that the rich that had their wealth transferred actually end up better off? I suppose it would largely depend on where the taken capitol had been invested and or if it was just sitting in low yield savings accounts.
Imagine the case of a working class family that has lived in CA for generations. The elderly grandmother owns a home because she bought it in the 1950s when things were not so broken. She has two grown children, each with families. One family lives in her house with her, because that’s all they can afford, but that’s okay because they want to stay close to home.
The other family rents a home nearby, because by the time whey were adults, hosing was out of reach.
In California, the only thing stopping rent increase is people’s ability to pay. In San Francisco, a 3bd apartment costs at least $4500/mo, and the median price is more like 8-10k per month.
That is because there are so very few available, and there are enough two income bankers and tech worker households who make enough to justify that rent that the market has no room for anyone else.
We go back to the working class family example, assuming the adults are gainfully employed and each making $60k/year. All they want is to continue living in the town they grew up in, where they have friends and decent jobs and their elderly parent to stay near. They pay $4000/mo, which is near the low end of market rate for a 3bd home for their family of 4, and also about half their after-tax income.
Now this UBI program (or any other change) happens, and a lot more income is suddenly flowing nearby. Anyone who for any reason finds themselves needing a new apartment has a little more money available, and so they can inch up just a bit in the market. But because demand so radically dwarfs supply, this means rents just tick up about 10% in short order.
So back to that family, the landlord notices the market has moved, and he raises the rent 10%. The landlord gains $400/mo. The tenants gain nothing except the “privelege” of non-eviction.
They now have to decide to pay more just to stay in place, or to try and downgrade to a worse apartment to keep costs in check. And if they do downgrade, they’re just displacing someone else who is farther down the economic ladder.
You described a free market scenario, which works on a whiteboard.
In the real world, California property owners have a monopoly on a fixed supply of housing, and nobody gets to participate in the California economy without a place to sleep at night. Thus any increase in productivity locally just goes to the property owners in short order, as they are enabled by the policies they’ve long fought for to extract their rental tax up to the ability of each person to pay. They use this unilateral power to extract all the gains.
Housing can either be a good investment, or remain affordable, both can not simultaneously happen.
It seems like that "privilege" is worth to the tenant than the money, even after the increase. Otherwise they would have moved. Therefore, it is not a zero sum game.
Part of the UBI idea is to reduce that overhead, though I'm at a loss as to how to ensure it stays low. The same politicians that turn our current system into a haphazard mess of special carveouts and regulations will still be in power and will have all the motivations (if not more) to add more carveouts and regulations to the new UBI.
If ten families want houses and there are only nine on the market, one family will go without whether you have auctions, price caps, land taxes, means testing, subsidies, or any other economic intervention, because nine is less than ten
So 9 out of 10 families get to live in a commutable distance to where they work, or 2 families get to live in half the appropriate space. Not good for the economy, not good for the families, very good for landlords.
Whether or not housing is naturally flexible, CA's government has done pretty darn well making it inflexible. See rents vs. inflation.
Every dollar of rent above costs for construction and necessary administration is a monetary redistribution from the renting class to property owners. CA doesn't lack land, and it doesn't lack the ability to pour concrete into earthquake-safe cubes with plumbing; the difficulty in construction and resulting high rents is the result of intentional obstruction and regulatory capture by the benefiting property owners.
Has California real estate valuations and rents not exceeded inflation for the past decade+? In economic equilibrium should rents not equal amortized construction costs? Have increasing rents not impacted commuting distances and housing availability for the renting class worker? Would these impactions not hurt the economy as a whole? Or do you disagree that regulatory barriers to building housing benefit those who own existing housing?
No.
I mean, even with the kind of generic-market idealized assumptions (such an unlimited competition) that never really apply to real estate anyhwere, rent would equal the amortized cost of providing the rental property, including land acquisition, construction, maintenance, etc.
[0]Regulatory-allowed access to said land, on the other hand, is less permissive.
Really? Show the numbers. I was under the impression that the Bay Area had a very high land ownership premium, that is, that land acquisition costs are very high compared to rents.
Plus, real prices are usually out of line with economic equilibria in dynamic markets, the equilibrium is the price that a market would achieve if it was in a steady state with no changes for an infinite period. A sustained market distortion raises the equilibrium, it doesn't maintain prices above the equilibrium. Prices above (or below) equilibrium are so are do to frictional forces which cause prices to adjust toward equilibrium at a limited rate. So, I'm not sure why you are harping on equilibrium, it seems to be the wrong issue for what you seem to be concerned about.
> Given in particular that in CA (the bay area and SF too) land is in surplus[0].
Even if that was true, regulatory permitted access largely effects rent through land acquisition costs, not independently of it, so it would explain why both land acquisition costs and rents were higher than they would otherwise be, but not why rents are higher than they would be expected to be given costs to landlords including land acquisition costs.
>>reasonable economic equilibrium
Sorry for the delayed reply:
Please see >reasonable in the above, there is nothing economically reasonable about the CA market distortion. Rents are higher than they would expected to be given costs not unjustifiably burdened by regulatory permitting. Which would be the (or at least a) reasonable standard for determining what rents should be at equilibrium which provides a basis for what rents should be in the real world and clearly indicates that rents in the real world are excessively high and not economically justified. I don't see where I've been unclear about this.
Over-regulation is only a part of the cost. The biggest part is the demand. But don't worry, whenever people figure out that silicon valley jobs can easily be relocated, to basically anywhere, that will all work itself out.
They, like anyone else, want to see a government act in their interest. Sometimes that means less government, sometimes it means more. Democrats want more government in healthcare, Republicans want more government in immigration; it is about what they want not how they get it.
And yes it will sort itself out, much like Detroit has worked itself out after the auto boom. It is just sad seeing myopic governance[0] lead CA towards that future.
[0]"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
And who is refusing to build more housing? I will personally arrange for as much housing as you like in any neighborhood in any city in California. Oh, for the price that you desire? OK, nope, sorry doesn't work that way.
People who say this are only ever looking at the node level, not the network level. Sure, new wealth is added to the network, but at a miniscule trickle compared to the everyday activities of the economic network.
"Wealth is not zero sum" essentially, if taken to its logical conclusion, means "everyone can be a billionaire!" No, they cannot.
"Not a zero sum game" means "both parties profit". That profit may not be money, therefore does not imply anything about billionaires.
I'm starting to feel it's really just the massive demand. California cities are already quite dense. We can certainly do more but to say we're historically failing just doesn't make sense to me.
I'd love to see numbers on just how much pent up demand there is and how much building would need to take place before residents felt it but I realize its not an easy thing to estimate.
Person per mile squared? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
For comparison's sake. Seoul, South Korea has 40K people per square mile (total population of 8 million people). That is the entire city. Overcrowded San Francisco city proper has 17K people per square mile and it is by far the most dense part of the Bay Area.
If Americans dont fix housing problem, any form of UBI is meaningless.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...
Plus managing those exclusions would likely cost more than it would save (imagine all the additional management overhead of cross-checking programs and or having people certify they aren't on them/policing fraud).
Actually I find the under-18 restriction kind of questionable too, since this could be a great system for supporting poor families. The real reason this cannot just happen outright is that it "competes" with too many other benefits that it could just outright replace instead.
The biggest problem with scrapping health insurance for UBI is that health insurance is astronomically expensive. I can see the argument for giving families with kids $1K/per kid, and just scrapping the food program to name one example.
As noted elsewhere, $1000/month for all adult residents adds up to more than the state's current budget.
The bill doesn't appear to remove other welfare programs. UBI is usually touted as a moral-judgement free program that replaces all the targeted welfare programs (food stamps, housing allowances, etc).
So, I'm glad people are taking UBI seriously. But, bills like this feel like a footgun. People are rightly suspicious of UBI (at minimum, it's new and untested) and bills like this do nothing to assuage their fears.
And I think that is the correct move. I'd expect the need for SNAP benefits, housing assistance, etc. would decrease (probably dramatically so) after UBI's implemented. But there will always be people who need help. You can't turn a blind eye to someone in need just because they're getting $12k/yr.
So, if CA food stamps + local housing assistance = $12k, then UBI would also be $12k. Otherwise, as you say, UBI isn't enough.
If this were part of a broader plan to consolidate benefits into a single program, it would make more sense. Give everybody the $1000 (or whatever amount) and if they qualify, bump that $1000 to $2000 (or whatever amount works out).
The whole point of UBI is to get out of managing many programs, with the overhead those entail. And if you have a libertarian tilt, it also gets us out of dictating morals to the poor.
If your unemployment benefits are less that UBI, you should get the difference in UBI, similarly excluding Medicaid recipients seems well, plain stupid.
> Medi-Cal program, the County Medical Services Program, the CalFresh program, the CalWORKs program, or Unemployment Insurance
I'm not entirely sure why, though.
> Medi-Cal is California's Medicaid program.
Because the ACA basically allows states to opt-out of providing medicaid, Medicaid has separate agencies for every state.
So I could understand if they want to try to replace existing welfare programs with UBI and then ratchet up the UBI amount until its better than the old programs (and more flexible).
But as-is, yeah, this doesnt help some of the ppl who need it most
Combining UBI with open borders / non enforcement of immigration policy is going to be interesting from a budget point of view.
[0]: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2019/2019-1031-publication.pdf
Since you are being condescendent about this, would you perhaps mind letting me know where in that document it states that you need to have entered the US legally to be resident?
I must be misunderstanding something. If you're unemployed and getting unemployment benefits you don't get your UBI? Isn't that part of the point of UBI?
Edit: Thanks to everyone helping me understand what I was missing!
Basically, no double dipping.
Instead, you just get UBI. In good times and in bad, so there's no weird income caps and disincentives to work. People don't have to deal with welfare cliffs (https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-...) and/or multiple welfare off-ramps simultaneously anymore.
Having UBI and still keeping means-tested welfare removes one of the best benefits of UBI. Most serious UBI proposals do what this one does: Either keep your current benefits or go on a UBI, whatever works best for you.
I appreciate that we wouldn't want the situation where instituting UBI stops (for example) severely disabled veterans getting specially adapted cars.
But doesn't this mean we retain all the forms and bureaucracies and weird income caps and disincentives to work, and the administrative costs that go with them?
Mostly not, because everyone whose weird byzantine collection of benefits doesn't add up to more than the UBI will abandon all of them and choose the UBI. That should be nearly everybody even if it isn't literally everybody.
Edit: making it clear it's federal level not state level legislation.
Health care spending can and has bankrupted many people with private insurance who are very well off compared to Medi-Cal recipients, so if the poor were forced to give up Medi-Cal to get $12k of UBI per year, and then spend that money on private health insurance, and spend even more of that money on food (since they'd also have to give up food stamps), it makes absolutely no economic sense for them to do that.
As far as the poor are concerned, this is an attempt to get rid of Medi-Cal and substitute it with private health insurance, and same with the other state-funded programs that help the poor.
The way it stands now this is an awful idea, and I'd only support it if it was truly universal and did not require the poor to give up the state support they have now.
If this proposed program doesn't actually help the poor then what is the fucking point?
So then they wouldn't do that. It says you can't get the UBI if you get Medi-Cal, it doesn't say you can't decline the UBI and continue to get Medi-Cal, right?
The entire point of a UBI is that it replaces all of these hacked together assistance programs with something with less overhead (no eligibility testing bureaucracy) and less economic distortion (giving restaurant workers food assistance when they already have access to food and could better use the money for transportation or education etc.)
If you like Medi-Cal, propose it as a "public option" -- instead of getting it if you're poor, you get it if you pay $6000/year or whatever it actually costs the state. Then people can take their $12,000 UBI, use $6000 to buy Medi-Cal and have $6000 left over. But then it lets people to choose not to, e.g. because their spouse's employer-subsidized private insurance would cover them for an additional $4000/year and they'd rather come out ahead by $2000.
Having both is silly because it doesn't get rid of that inefficiency. If you instead wanted people to have a $12,000 UBI and $6000 in medical coverage then just give them $18,000 and let them decide whether they want to buy $6000 in medical coverage or something else. You can debate the amount of assistance but it still makes no sense to force people to buy specific things.
I wonder how they will administer the VAT without other states cooperating with them.
Without even taking into account the existing tax rate in California, wouldn't this need an average of 10k of spending per person a month getting this to work out?
Then again there are enough restrictions on this (seemingly largely the ones that would actually benefit the most from this) that it actually works out...
So that does spread that out a bit if you take into account anyone buying those manufactured goods outside of the state.
Then that personally raises the question on how this would scale nationwide, the cost to the business would ultimately be largely pushed down to the consumer. Maybe that is getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but I keep hearing about a UBI and I struggle with seeing the logistics of it.
The timing of UBI and an impending recession are a bad formula for the state and will definitely change the political landscape of California. ie likely to see some politicians voted out of office and flipping the majority.
And perhaps this'll be the first program to survive the trolls and nay-sayers who will find the smallest niche failures and sspout the "If ANYONE falls through the cracks it's a FAILURE!"
> It is the intent of the Legislature to fund the CalUBI Program with a value-added tax of 10 percent on goods and services, except medicine, medical supplies and equipment, educational materials, including textbooks, tuition or fees for education, food, groceries, and clothing.
However, I think another real world test to join the others is fine. You don't know the result until you do the experiment.
Same reason you don't jump off a building to test gravity. There are better ways to test than irreparably derailing an economy by +not closing the inequality gap and +causing spikes of inflation any time you dish out money, proportional to how much you dish out
Finland did a real world UBI test. Unless you don't consider Finland part of the "real world."
A ubi test that isn’t universal seems potentially counterproductive to me.
If you increase property taxes, doesn't that make housing developers less likely to build high-value, high-density housing? And don't the property tax increases on existing housing just get passed on to the renters?
I've never rented in California, but I've rented in 13 other states, and in the handful of cities where I've lived during a property tax increase, the rent went up quite a bit (especially Chicago). One place even itemized it on the rent statement.
Like others have mentioned, it seemed like the benefits of UBI were to eliminate some redundancy from similar programs that require more administration. Creating a new tax seems non-trivial, but on the other hand would be easy to ratchet up down the road.
The unintended consequences of such a policy are far-reaching and poorly understood. UBI has seen a lot of coverage in the media recently and gets a lot of people excited on social media. Most coverage of it is shallow, but even the most in-depth studies of it that have been performed have been too small scale to have any bearing on the reality of transforming an entire state's economy.
It would be nice if we lived in a post-scarcity (or sufficiently close) economy where we could afford these things. I doubt we do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
I agree that the CA proposal feels reckless, though.
This is surprising to me. Which recent california laws are you referring to that have done this?
Given the recent state-wide rent control, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a sop to landlords.
then attracting as many warm bodies as possible to these "centers of productivity" will result in an explosion of wealth production