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Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

>What happened?

Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. That's what happened. There simply isn't enough tax revenue, even if you seized 100% of the wealth and future earnings of the wealthy, to provide a basic income sufficient for most people to live off of.

Also a lot of proposals would have ended up giving the poor and elderly less than they get under current programs. And the claims of reduced overhead wouldn't have made much of a dent in things either, IIRC admin costs for Social Security are less than 1% of what the actual payouts are

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> Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both.

I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical.

That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.

But it wouldn’t be $2000 per worker, as you’d have to get enough tax money to pay the people who aren’t working that $2000. If I make $6000 a month and you make $0 a month, and then we both get $2000 a month from my taxes, how can my take home pay remain $6000?

Well, it would be you and several of your peers making $6000 a month, one or two people making an order of magnitude more per month, and a whole heckuva lot of people making $3k-$4k a month, contributing a progressively bigger portion to the one person making $0. So, no, you don't hang on to the full $6000... But then you may get it back from taxing the capital holdings of those people who own exceptionally large amounts of private property.

You would get an increase of $2000 in the form of UBI, but increase in taxes of $2000, so your net would remain the same. It's assumed tha UBI would replace current unemployment benefits. Of course UBI can be expensive if the amount is too large.

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