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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it.

Well the numbers being off by an order of magnitude is a good reason. The US tax revenue would have to double just to pay for anything that resembles UBI.

The carbon tax would have to be obscene to gather that amount of money (another $25k in taxes on a middle class US family). Even if people survive the initial shock, the rapid drop in demand for anything with a carbon tax now means that UBI has a budget shortfall and has to be cut.

It’s horrendously stupid to tie something we want to be dependable (UBI) to revenue from taxation on things we want to stop.

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The majority of the M0 money supply, that bit of currency we use to get things done in our economy, is created by fiat at any of the ~4500 commercial banks (in the USA). Every time they give out a loan they create the money out of thin air as debt on their balance sheets. They are only required to have a tiny fraction of the money they 'loan'/create (fractional reserve).

If instead of letting only these banks create money, if the new M0 money supply was distributed to ~300 million human people instead of ~4500 corporate people, there'd be plenty for basic income. It'd be universal basic income then instead of commercial bank basic income. And banks could just be banks and get by on their actual services instead of being money machines.

... and that's not even acknowledging what the NY Fed have begun doing since October of last year, 10s to 100s of billions a week swapped for worthless items from corporations who can't pay their bills in Reverse Repo operations: a shallow attempt to pretend it isn't just giving money away (https://apps.newyorkfed.org/en/markets/autorates/temp).

Whether you fund UBI through printing or not is unrelated to the function of banks. Society still needs to divert extra cash to people who are extra productive with ideas and businesses. But how do you know how much extra money to give to whom? You make a dedicated layer in society who's sole function and incentive structure is to distribute that money to those most likely to use it best and name it "banks".

I'm with you. Eventually people would probably create something like banks from their pooled M0 created by fiat. But unlike the current system everyone would be aware it was their money and not some intrinsic value of the banks' so there'd be significantly less nepotism, corruption, etc. Just the initial sheer distributed nature of it would significantly help.

Those extra productive ideas and businesses generally aren't. It's just that money begets money and then people confuse being wealthy with positive traits enabled by having money, like productivity.

So how many of the assets owned by the FED have become worthless if these corporations “can’t pay their bills”? Should be pretty significant if what you’re saying is true.

Even ignoring that tenuous claim, UBI is not a loan like the money that goes out via fractional reserve banking. The only way it would be similar is if every single entity who received a loan via a bank spent the money and declared bankruptcy.

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