Pelosi: It's time to consider universal basic income pushed by Andrew Yang
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Healthcare is the obvious one. It's not like you can get a surgery and then resell it to exploit the system. (You could, of course, exploit things like pain medication, but overall healthcare is not expoitation-friendly.)
Some amount of water, electricity, Internet access, and some amount of food are other good candidates. (Shelter is a much harder problem to solve and one where I think going through money is probably a better approach.)
I'd much rather see every person be given a reasonable amount of food, water, electricity, Internet access, and good healtcare. That is almost enough to lift people out of poverty and give them enough safety and security to enable them to live healthy, successful lives.
Then maybe see if it makes sense to provide money too. But my hunch is that UBI itself isn't a great solution. You can think of it effectively as a negative tax rate for the poor. The UBI has to be paid for by other taxes, so at some income/wealth level you will be breaking even and above that you will be paying for the UBI for people under.
I think that structure is perfectly fine for moral reasons, but looking at it from that perspective, it's not clear to me how simply having a relatively minor negative tax rate will solve the systemic problems faced by the poor. Getting a check for a hundred bucks every month isn't going to fix everything if you break your back and need a million dollars in healthcare.
What people need to thrive is security the knowledge that if unfortunate events outside of their control happen, that they will be helped to the degree that society is able. If you know you can be made bankrupt if you get sick, or your access to water can be shut off if someone robs you, then you are "poor" in all of the ways that subjectively matter.
Letting government give a basic income and the private sector filling supply is a much more reasonable solution.
Let’s a free market exist to satisfy demand while recognizing the end of jobs is about here.
Even Adam Smith warned of natural monopolies. Nearly any economist will tell you letting them be private and under-regulated is nuts.
The same with healthcare. Why is every other first world country able to get objectively better health outcomes for less money with universal healthcare? How is our system better?
Is health expenditure in the US higher than in other countries? Yes, but that is because the US is rich, really rich. If we plot US Real Household Income against healthcare consumption, the US is perfectly inline with global trends[1].
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/articles/concord-2....
[1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2018/11/19/why-everything...
Also nurses and other low-level health workers have low pay compared to the rest of the first world as their salaries did not increase as much as other wokers.
[0] https://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/chart/2017/health-care-syst...
[2] (doing the math myself i found 13% but i think that's because they are also paying the retirement pensions)
This is what I would predict would happen with any UBI, more generally: it would just raise the prices of the things that people have to buy until all the money wound up with those who had the capital and the sophistication to capture it. It's not clear you'd even wind up with more of those things you listed, but it is certain you'd pay more for what you did get.
Here's a way to think of it: A society succeeds to the degree that it harnesses the maximum of each individual's potential.
The goal then is for a society to remove impediments that prevent someone from reaching their potential. Imagine a potential Einstein born to unfortunately poor parents. One measure of the how well these services are calibrated is the degree that that Einstein is able to reach their potential despite the misfortune of their parents.
Lack of early child care, eduction, transportation and certainly (non-cosmetic) dental care can certainly stifle someone's potential, so those seem like reasonable problems for a just society to aim to address.
For example; universal basic water in Arizona might have the adverse effect of incentivizing greater water consumption. Universal basic fuel can incentivize wasteful fuel usage, and so forth.
In countries that provide basic rations, there are absolutely massive problems with people illegally siphoning subsidized food, water, and electricity and reselling in black markets or other countries with unsubsidized goods for profit. (Haven't heard of it for Internet or healthcare, but where there's a will there could be a way.)
EDIT: removed healthcare
Do you have any credible sources on that?
You say that like it's a bad thing. But the fundamental premise of human progress should be that the baseline for all people gradually goes up over time. If anything, I consider it a feature that it becomes hard to lower a baseline once it's entrenched. That makes it harder for a powerful minority to take over and then deliberately leave the poor behind by taking away services from them.
> For example; universal basic water in Arizona might have the adverse effect of incentivizing greater water consumption.
This is a great example. I consider "basic" to be an important word in the term. The baseline level should be set such that if everyone consumes the resource at that level, then we are OK with that. A universal basic water that gave everyone in Arizona 1,000 gallons per day would probably be a bad choice.
> In countries that provide basic rations, there are absolutely massive problems with people illegally siphoning subsidized food, water, and electricity and reselling in black markets or other countries with unsubsidized goods for profit.
I see that as partly a problem of those countries being woefully deficient in some other critical resource. There must be some resource they need more than food that makes it worth giving up the ration on the black market in order to be able to afford it. Like many systems, a system like universal basic services can't work in isolation. It must be designed in the holistic context of its participants.
Also, of course, any system like this does need to have enforcement. At scale, some fraction of participants will be bad actors and the system has to be designed with that in mind.
(I accept that one of the good things about about UBI versus providing services directly is that money is much more liquid than services, so participants can more easily rebalance as needed to keep the system in harmony.)
People choose to spend more or less on food, eat different things, etc. If I want to spend a lot on food, that's my choice, but I should give up something else. Or if I decide to eat rice and lentils multiple times a week, I should be able to save money.
Even more important than fairness is just practicality. There's a huge amount of infrastructure dedicated to people going to stores/restaurants to buy food in the manner they see fit.
They allow basics to have controlled pricing, and increased availability, while preventing abuse of the system (ie, alcohol purchases).
Having dispensaries (or dispensary-specific items in a general store) where you can use your food stamp money would leverage a working system we have now.
You would still have the problem that it wouldn't actually provide food for everyone or some people would end up losing the money because they're frugal.
So while food stamps (universal or need based) may not be a perfect solution (selling food stamps for drug money is not unheard of), it is still better, because it makes misappropriating the help provided more difficult.
But it doesn't matter because far more people will use it for good things like feeding and clothing their families.
On balance, that's better than what we do now, which is that the addicts still abuse substances, but many who are not addicts struggle to provide for their families.
Don't overlook the basic part in the term. The goal is not to provide all the food that everyone wants to eat. It would be to provide basic access to the baseline food needed to be healthy and functioning.
If you want more than that, great. Now you have an incentive to work. That's good, because we must incentivize people to be productive members of society otherwise the whole system collapses.
The intent with providing basic services or income is not to lower the total productive output of a society by removing incentives to work. Its to raise the total productivity by removing the inefficiencies caused when people are too poor, unhealthy, or afraid to work hard or be entrepreneurial.
In the latter two years of grad school, my wife and I ate very cheaply. I was always at home or at the office with a fridge and microwave, had time to make bread and things like that. But there are working poor people work places where that's not easy to do, and so they end up spending a good bit more on food.
It's bin-packing. If people have different needs, making each bin big enough for all of them is gonna cost more than giving them money that they can move between their various bins.
I am entirely convinced that universal healthcare should happen well before we start worrying about UBI.
There is actually a wealth of data that shows that poverty changes how brains functions and interferes with long term planning.
> As a rapper once alluded, foodstamps don't buy diapers.
True, but that's probably mostly a consequence of the fact that food stamps were created by the Department of Agriculture partially to address food production surpluses.
I don't know if I believe this. It's unpopular, but I think being completely secure may have some negatives. For example, drawing upon my own life experiences, I found it hard to find motivation to be productive when I was completely secure in all my needs. I ended up playing a lot of video games and watching a lot of anime. However, once I lost my training slot in the Air Force and it looked like my cushy military job was no longer guaranteed, it lit a fire under my butt and I was highly motivated to start sharpening my computer industry skills, doing side projects, etc. in case it didn't work out and I had to find a "real job" (and it didn't work out).
We didn't need perfect social security to thrive historically. I don't see evidence of people in EU countries with tons of social services thriving.
Historically, all we needed to thrive was the promise that hard work, creativity, or both, would be proportionally rewarded. Somewhere along the way we've lost this (or at least part of it). We should work to bring that back, and provide enough social services to help people become self-reliant (if they aren't already).
I don't know if that will fit a lot of people's idea of thriving (it's highly personal). That's really survival skills so you don't end up homeless.
Some really do thrive on chaos, uncertainty, and not being comfortable though. It becomes a real challenge for them and they feel good when they overcome the adversity.
Others don't need that, they can improve themselves for the sake of improving. Chaos and uncertainty keep them from focusing on improving. People who can sit quietly and do math or programming or whatever and just learn.
So the question is, what % of people are like that, and what percentage are like me (complete security I didn't really have to work for robbed my motivation). If only a small % of people become more productive in free complete security, and the majority become less productive under free complete security... is free complete security still worth it?
My thoughts are those people can find something else to drive them. I bet at some point you will likely get bored or depressed of simply playing video games and watching anime all day and you'll seek out challenges for yourself.
Taking one's "common sense" anecdotes and applying them to society as a whole is where things get problematic. For the latter you need data and analysis to guide you as well as common sense.
Shouldn't that make UBI unpopular as well? Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence.
The facts differ with your opinion [1].
> Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence.
This attitude is likely what leads to mass adoption of conspiracy theories. Not all of which are false, but most are missing key facts and/or context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots#Madhya_Pra...
Well, a "cushy military job" isn't really a place where hard work and creativity are rewarded. I'd regard that as a more plausible cause for that lack of motivation, as opposed to simply being secure in one's basic needs.
People need enough risk of negative consequences to encourage them to make wise decisions. But they also need enough security (especially in things outside of their control) in order to be able to prioritize long-term goals over short-term ones.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2018/12/13/672952507/does-more-federal-a...
In an important way they are opposite: UBI incentivizes price discovery; government backed college loans decentivize it.
If you say so.
> It's hard to argue that college fees would have gone up so much if the government just gave a fixed $10000/year loan to every student-age citizen and let them spend it on whatever they want.
Really? I find it very easy to imagine, since IIRC student loans can be spent not only on tuition but on living expenses — and it seems to be possible to spend it on anything you want, even though you're not supposed to do that. [1] But I'm out of touch in that area, so my experience could be out of date.
The NPR piece that I cited above discussed research indicating that for-profit college tuition costs were strongly influenced by the availability of guaranteed student loans.
> UBI incentivizes price discovery
I suppose that's possible. But analogously, the availability of employer-provided health insurance seems to disincentivize price discovery.
[1] https://studentloanhero.com/featured/what-can-i-spend-studen...
That I certainly agree with.
Is access to healthcare important? Yes, but universal healthcare eliminates market forces which makes things efficient. A better way would be a mixture of health saving accounts (and redistributive transfers to such accounts) and subsidizing hospitals (to reflect the fact that healthcare is typically underconsumed).
Further, the government lacks the necessary profit incentive to keep costs low or maintain high standards. Bureaucrats on fixed salaries have no incentive to try harder.
First, require each person to set aside part of their income to a HSA.
Second, top up the values of those HSA's through government transfers for the poor and lower income.
Third, mandate that HSA's can only be used for real healthcare (and not alternative medicine). This way, individuals can afford healthcare but will still take responsibility to not deplete their accounts unnecessarily.
Fourth, (and in response to the NhanN's question) subsidize healthcare providers because healthcare tends to be underconsumed. Why is healthcare underconsumed? When we think about the importance of our own health, we only think of ourselves or our families. But we are valuable to our employer, to our friends. To correct for these positive externalities, some subsidization is essential to bring down those costs.
You are right in that my post didn't address the issues of childcare, let alone genetic diseases, long term conditions etc. where the price mechanism doesn't really make sense or fails. Any healthcare policy will have nuances that I cannot capture in a comment. But for the majority of healthcare consumption, we should really be trying to be as efficient as we can be precisely because of how costly it can be. Throwing away the price mechanism just because it fails for the edge cases is not ideal.
I disagree.
You don’t sign yourself up for surgery at the first ache.
Health is a basic human right and if your country can support that I believe it has a duty to do so.
If the system was nationalised then it has massive negotiating power when buying equipment and supplies.
That’s what happens with what’s left of our NHS before greedy capitalists got hold of it.
Just from personal experience, I don't have copays or much in the way of direct monetary costs (I'm not American) and it's not like I'm out there grabbing free drugs and surgeries. There's a cost other than money to everything, time and effort and rehabilitation and fear of the unknown and so on. As another example my retired parents have messed up knees and hips but they don't feel it warrants the hassle/risk even though it'd not cost them anything to have surgeries, there's more to it than just financial consideration.
Health savings accounts doesn't seem that great though - I don't know if I'll ever have health issues so if I'm socking away $x00/month I'm removing that from the economy betting against my health. Assuming a somewhat capable health care system I'd rather pay that amount to the government in taxes so they can leverage it now for someone else and if my time comes, then I don't have to worry about dollars and cents and what I can afford.
Also if the government had the money from everyone now in the form of taxes instead of individuals socking it away, it'd be more able to purchase equipment and hire doctors well in advance and the local hospital may have better capacity to cater to my needs.
Just my two cents.
A pretty safe bet, seeing as most people's health gets quite a bit worse over time.
Huh? Surgeries don't work like that, they all have significant risks of giving you worse problems than you already have. And even if successful, they're not going to leave you "good as new" or anything like that.
Also, the price mechanism doesn't actually do anything to sort out who "truly needs healthcare," all it does it make it so the wealthy can get whatever they want and the poor can't even get what they need. The actual mechanism for preventing unnecessarily and wasteful medical care is the professional ethics of doctors and the caution of patients.
Each Corp will start saying things like if we can just get 10 bucks out of that UBI bank account for 50 million people a quarter...and if 50 manage to pull it off we end up back in 2008. Its the same way they sold "low cost housing for all".
Without exact details answering such, do voters believe this is more than seeking voter-attention. Are there actual plans of implementation whose economics/numbers work?
I see people discuss such but never see answers.
edit: Back of the envelope math shows that 1000/month for the US population is about $4 trillion/year. The Fed has pumped more than that into financial markets since this pandemic has started, alone. That is why the S&P is back up to where it was in 2018, despite the world suffering the greatest demand shock in history. Pumping up the financial markets is doing nowhere near the economic good that a UBI would right now.
My guess is that it wouldn't cause much inflation, since much of the demand destruction we've seen will be permanent.
1. https://www.thebalance.com/consumer-debt-statistics-causes-a...
EDIT: Thanks to those who provided such insightful answers! Very helpful for a layperson like me.
The velocity has dropped rapidly in recent weeks. To not increase supply would be deflationary.
The real danger in times of low demand is a deflationary spiral. Those are fiendishly hard to get out of, as the last few decades for Japan have demonstrated.
How much does the US government subsidize the average US citizen in services, tax rebates, etc.? Is it more or less than what Venezuela offered its citizens in cash payments? I honestly don't know, but I've become more convinced lately that Venezuela's issues have less to do with the efficacy of their policies than they do objections to the nature of their intended distribution of wealth.
UBI is a giveaway not a loan.
Who loses out more under devaluation?
And not all inflation is created equal. With QE, the printed dollars never make it to Main street, they end up inflating asset prices, while the price of butter stays the same. Whether that's a good thing is an exercise for the reader.
He also talked about the actual implementation a lot during the campaign.
The DNC old guard, who mostly ignored Yang and ostracized and smeared Gabbard now seem to be slowly grasping some of these ideas and seeing how they could be tetrised into their status quo without disturbing too much...
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-tulsi-gabb...
These are ideas seldom entertained by UBI proponents, because as soon as they are seriously considered, it becomes clear that there aren’t even nearly enough rich to pay everyone $1000 a month.
However, there are different degrees of "rich" (which, if you want to quibble, can include things like having a yard full of chickens and plenty of time to read [1]). The taxes to pay for expanded social benefits should fall progressively across that whole range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
I would even advocate taking it a step further, and replacing HSA's and Social Security with individual savings accounts, a la Singapore. Approved purchases (up to a certain amount of rent, food stamps like foods, medical expenses) qualify for tax free or subsidized purchase (this is mostly psychological, giving people a "discount" vs depositing more money in their account, but it can also steer their behavior.) The government invests a certain amount in each person, and then they can contribute an additional amount from payroll. Segregate the money into two tiers, allow money in the "long term" side of the account to grow through some kind of investment, but minimize or eliminate the choice of how it is invested. Cap per year spending on everything except medical. Make it closer to a CD than SP500 investment. Everybody gets the same glide, per a single factor such as age or retirement date. Returns are guaranteed. Allow certain penalized/taxed hardship withdrawls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund
Plan: America First Sovereign Fund (mineral/luxury/sin tax), deposits into Forced Savings Account at USPS, which includes a tiered account that subtracts the qualifying part of a purchase from Savings Account, the rest gets charged to a Debit/Credit card on file. Allow the reverse, where Chase, WF, BoA, Citi can link their cards to your Savings Account, and automatically deduct qualifying purchases from it. Allow opt in for digital receipt tracking, or receipt scanning a la expensify, so you don't have to maintain records of purchases for disputes. If you use your bank card, you control what records are forwarded and stored in your USPS account.
This does five things. It pays for the program. It gives everybody some individual responsibility to manage their account, while helping them save. It steers their purchases towards healthy. It gives everyone access to a public bank account that is tax exempt. It lets them not have to manage multiple swipes at the register.
Finally, I'd advocate for a hybrid FTC/AG managed consumer protection service. Sort of a Consumer Reports / Wirecutter service on steroids that's easy for everyone to track their purchases, warranties, and to comparison shop with. A single place for product recalls, safety warnings, price comparisons, and information regarding what the best purchase to make is.
What part of energy ownership don't you disagree with? I still wasn't advocating against private industry doing the extraction or creation. Just that if you pull something from underground, it gets taxed and benefits everybody, not just the person who bought it from the person who stole it 175 years ago.
What is the purpose of that tax? In public finance, we don't want to unnecessarily distort incentives by picking winners and losers. Taxing natural resource extraction for no good reason chases away companies in those industries and forces them to pursue other businesses, possibly leaving only the most profitable monopolies to survive. If we want to raise revenue, why not just raise VAT, corporate tax, income tax, or property tax more generally.
It would be akin to the government pulling eminent domain, and saying "the oil under the country belongs to the people, not who owns the deed."
This is basically what Alaska did. They said "if you plunder our natural resources, the profit gets shared with the people whos natural resources you are plundering."
Same holds true for universal health care, social housing, subsidies etc etc. They may sound absurd in beginning but governments do implement them.
So if you can't completely start from scratch, then ultimately the only source of revenue for UBI would be to cut spending somehow (good luck convincing the Pentagon of that), or to generate additional taxation on businesses (which resulted in them moving crucial facilities to Mexico, Eastern Europe, India, China, etc)
At some point, the USA might be better off if we all have a dividend for every citizen based on our country's profit, like Alaska has currently.
This way it is not a guarantee how much you will make, but it is something.
If we dont do this, surely robots will replace most jobs.
Im suggesting that there is enough money when you think in totality so this is merely a question of how comfortable you are with redistribution. Your saying 2.5 trillion annually; ok thats only like 12% of GDP. It is also completely logical that in the 21 century that only about 10% of value generated is enough to keep everyone fed clothed and sheltered.
I'm saying there are not enough people with more than people less to provide that $12,000 transfer to each person in a way that benefits most people.
If you just took 20% of people making over 150k it would be enough to give 1k a month to the bottom 50%. (and yes i understand this is household)
And this of course is the silly idea that your giving people making 50k a year 12k more for some reason. This also doesnt include the real money up at the top top end. It also doesnt include any wealth transfers (scary)
I think (with respect) you just dont realize how much wealth is out there.
I think you are describing some system that is sorta some sorta economically inconsistent plan. Everyone gets 1k a month and nobody pays for it doesnt make economic sense.
The people that push UBI dont think in these illogical ways. They know very well that some people will have to pay for it. Some people wont see any gain. And some people will see gain.
Your confused about how this system is a win for everyone. Its not! Thats what I said at top ; its redistributive.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQi8jWpWkAMQ_5d?format=jpg&name=...
Examine that graph and you'll clearly see you're taking $500 billion from net contributers and paying out $1.55 trillion to net beneficiaries. AND THIS IS ACCORDING TO HIS OWN CAMPAIGN. He's literally planning to pay out 3x what he's taking in.
In the fine print he admits that he has to pay for it with "future economic growth", i.e. debt. (you cant pay out cash for something now by hoping the economy grows in the future, it's physically impossible... you need debt to bridge the gap)
But explain to me how taking $1050 from the average person in order to pay $1000 to the average person grows GDP?
The simple fact of the matter is that this cannot be achieved without perhaps scrapping every other social program (Medicare, medicaid, social security) AND raising taxes in addition.
The policies of say Yang are not that interesting as for the most part he isnt really talking redistribution and I think he himself is ideologically opposed to it.
How I tend to think about the economy is very much like a game. If you have played say a game like "Banished" (https://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/Banished/) you can see how the economy works without the notions of money/debt/politics. Obviously it doesnt represent the real economy but it comes close to getting a taste. If you send me your Steam ID I will buy you a copy.
Speaking of which, I googled Germany's VAT and it seems there are quite a few exemptions ("food, books, hotel accommodation, cultural services and other goods and services") that only get VATed at 7%, which is much closer to the 6% they apparently collect in practice. But sure, they probably do fail to collect quite a bit of what they theoretically could.
A lot of GDP is exempt from VAT by design. It's easiest to see if you look at the expenditure approach to GDP. For a simplest example, government expenditure is effectively exempt from VAT. Exports are VAT-exempt (though it only matters if you export more than import, because imports are subtracted in expenditure approach to GDP calculation). Another part of GDP effectively exempt from VAT is capital goods: when a business buys a piece of equipment, it technically pays VAT on it, but it also gets the same amount they paid as a credit for the VAT due on their own sales. The business gets to "consume" the capital good by utilizing it in production process, but doesn't pay any VAT for it on net.
You can't squeeze enough money out of the rich to give the middle class a free ride, there's not quite enough of it, and there's too much of a middle class.
Edit:
If you really want to tax the rich, don't tax their money, tax the things they own. Land value taxes. Taxes on stocks. The purpose of doing this shouldn't be to fund a social program, but to align the prosperity of the nation with their prosperity.
If the government were a passive shareholder in ~40% of the S&P 500, then the nation as a whole would directly benefit from 40% of the returns of capitalism. If we had land value taxes, then the nation would directly benefit from the high cost of land (Which currently is nothing but a cost, and a drag on the economy, and funds all sorts of rent-seeking, unproductive uses of land.) And would skim a good slice of the rent-seeking parts of the economy.
Giving $1000 a month to 210 million people costs $210 billion a month, $2.5 trillion a year.
I believe that the annual federal tax revenue is about $3.4 trillion.
> Giving $1000 a month to 210 million people costs $210 billion a month, $2.5 trillion a year.
> I believe that the annual federal tax revenue is about $3.4 trillion.
If you're going to implement a UBI program (or any kind of large-scale social democratic benefits program), taxes will be increased to pay for it.
It also sounds a little circular: Increase people's taxes so that you can use the income to give money back to them.
Progressive taxation doesn't work that way. The whole idea is that some would pay in more than they take out; in some cases, far more.
In concrete terms, Andrew proposed a VAT, while also reorganizing existing social welfare programs, of which there are uncountable multitudes, each with highly specific eligibility requirements and screening and fraud machinery, into a more coherent, holistic delivery model that de-prioritized or eliminated eligibility.
His numbers "work" but at that scale they entail such an enormous reworking of federal and state machinery that they're in practical terms a non-starter. Cue up recent conversations about M4A, Obamacare, etc, but on an even larger scale. (disclaimer: I support the idea, but appreciate it is more conceptual value than concrete implementation.)
Right now, Fed govt takes in $3.8 trillion in revenues, mostly taxes, spends $4+ trillion, with two thirds of fiscal dollars going to human-oriented mandatory programs like social security, medicare, medicaid, various federally funded insurance programs, etc and one third going to discretionary, which itself is half military, then half everything else.
A VAT would essentially be a transaction tax that scaled to GDP, so from a model perspective, while GDP is $20T, a VAT would bring in $2T of new revenues, sufficient to begin a conversation about giving $10k/year to 200,000,000 people. In reality- who knows. A VAT would have huge implications and lots and lots of things would change.
A lot of the comments center around credit dollars that the Fed has created- basically large scale loans- to provide transitory liquidity to the financial system. Those comments misunderstand the nature of credit dollars, but IMHO they are not wrong. Credit dollars are a completely different tool than the above fiscal dollars generated from taxes. The US government has essentially infinite credit capacity.
To my eyes credit dollars are both a better and more appropriate funding source for something like UBI, particularly if UBI is tweaked to focus on the liquidity needs of children, women, and those whose current fiscal value is low relative either to future value or to the fiscal value of others. I would love Pelosi to consider that as a concrete option, the politics seem ideal for it.
Imagine if everyone had a catastrophic healthcare plan that was essentially an out-of-pocket maximum of $12,000. And then everyone gets $12,000 a year to spend on healthcare - or anything else.
I fully support requiring a license to have a baby.
This includes things like lifestyle, including habits, striving to learn & build good family ties, honesty, choosing to pursue education and service, more than just entertainment and pleasure (but with appropriate balance), trustworthiness, avoiding self-destructive behaviors, etc etc. All which greatly affect employability!
But if we make it easily survivable to live on the wrong side of those...what do we encourage? At ever-greater cost to everyone... Think we have a drug problem now?
Some consistently very bad experiences with medicare's and SSA's organizational incompetence (as reflected in ability to provide remotely useful information over many weeks and months, etc) make me definitely not want the federal government to take ever-more resources and control of our economy and lives.
I do believe we are responsible (before God, and if one doesn't believe, then at least to our consciences) to care wisely for one another, and with personal sacrifice to do so -- but not by force.
I also believe, with a fair amount of observation and study among myself and family, that things resembling forcible socialism (or the fed. government solving everyone's problems instead of being strictly limited to its constitutional role) are also harmful to everyone and have been proven many times to be a disastrous failure (Soviets, Venezuela, etc etc).
Charity by force is wrong and foolish, from Christian principle, long historical observation, and (to me at least), logic.
Charitable service done voluntarily by individuals, organizations, families, communities, maybe even states who can then learn from each other what works vs. not, can be wonderful, and I and many others have seen it work in long-term multifaceted practice. But when we force a system on everyone -- bad things happen, in the short and long run.
We can go out and do good and solve problems, by joining with others, using persuasion and fundraising, creating jobs programs (not federal), promoting good ideas, seeing what has worked well elsewhere, but not by forcibly taking control of others people's money (which represents their time and energy, planning and preparation) and thus a loss of freedom for all. Every crisis should not be an excuse to expand control by some, over others.
I have written many more details about this & related subjects at my web site, which is in my profile.
I very much hope we can promote principles over politics, such as: earned trust matters; opportunity, honesty and the Golden Rule matter; charity is important, charity by force is wrong, and breaking the link between choices and consequences harms everyone.
It is a lot of money, and eventually the money comes out of something, be it the increased prices from increased buying power in the market or the loss of buying power due to slippage against inflation driven by government spending debasing the currency. (they are two sids of the same coin i guess)
It wont happen immediately, this is a massive deflationary shock right now, but surely helicopter money will do what is intended and drive inflation eventually undermining the intended effect of UBI in the first place. The economy is dynamic and reflexive, if everyone knows that everyone is getting x amount of money increased demand and information in the market will drive prices quickly higher.
Government planners will eventually seek ways to mitigate this outcome, perhaps by pegging UBI payments to inflation or enacting price controls on say rents or taxes to take money out of circulation perhaps through a VAT. Either way this is the long-run nightmare of more directly managing an economy from the top down. And I fear that it is a road that leads to a far less dynamic, creative and self sustaining economy.
The intended economic foundation for everyone that UBI seeks to provide may prove to be a short term benefit and eventually become a complex game of trying to control a very complex system.
So that's 200M people * (12 months / year) * 1000 / person = 2.4 trillion.
Most of the budget is defense, social security, medicare and interest on the debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...).
Yang's plan would've required major tax increases, and/or cuts to core programs. This isn't me editorializing, just stating what would be required.
My recollection is that there was too much squabbling within the Democrat party to achieve it, with moderates wavering.
And with the Senate putting in a watered down public option, it killed any chance for the House to submit tgeir own.
"Democrats didn't want it because their insurance company sponsors didn't want it."
"Democrats didn't fight for it because they needed votes from a few people who wouldn't support it."
I'm partial to the view that they could have motivated those few senators to vote for a public option if they tried. Democrats wave their hands too much on the viability of progressive policy for my taste. Whether the belief in that unviability is genuine or a smokescreen is uncertain.
We all know how that turned out.
I don’t recall if the public option was ever included in the house bill. Do you?
>On 12 March 2010, as she prepared for her final push to pass reform legislation, House Speaker Pbbnelosi shut the door on using reconciliation to preserve the public option. While citing the lack of support in the Senate, Pelosi was also aware of the deep concerns that moderates in her caucus had regarding the public option. The narrow vote (219–212) in the House on 21 March 2010 suggests that every possible vote was needed. The House passed the Senate bill (HR 3590) and the reconciliation bill without a public option.
It was included in several House versions of the bill coming out of committee. She didn't fight for it. In fact, she heralded its loss as a win for bipartisanship and her own negotiation campaign.