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Comment by zimbatm | Hacker News Reader

Where does that money come from?

The US population has 199M adults[1]. Let's say a decent basic income is $40k. That's 8 Trillion that the government has to find every year.

The US federal tax revenue was of 3.86 Trillion last year[2]. Half of which comes from individual income, and another third from payroll taxes. This is before the effects that UBI will have on the economy.

Maybe my 10 minute research is wrong? It seems like a quite central piece to address in an article promoting UBI.

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+adults+in+th... [2]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/budget...

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Where does the money currently come from? Take $1000 of each monthly salary and put a "UBI" sticker on it. Everybody currently employed now gets $1000 UBI for the total price of nothing.

For a person earning $3000+ per month nothing changes, except that their salary now reads $2000+ (same money to spend etc.). For a person currently earning $1500, negotiations with their employer will be different because the salary reads only $500 and losing out on just 1/3 of your income while looking for a new job is doable (if still painful).

But what about a person currently working a job but earning less than $1000? This person doesn't exist because of the "B". But what about a person earning $1100, won't they simply stop working? No, again "B" and never happened in any of the trials done thus far.

That's not UBI though, that's a negative income tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

> The expression 'negative income tax' (NIT) is used in roughly the same sense as basic income, sometimes with different connotations in respect of the mechanism, timing or conditionality of payments

potayto, potahto

A UBI funded by progressive taxes will always be a negative income tax, net-net.

Would the initial 1000$ UBI be paid by the state or by the employer? Assuming that the employee is above threshold.

What about the person currently working part-time for $500? It seems like it wouldn't make any material change for them as it would be swallowed by UBI.

Wait, why would every single adult be on basic income?

The U in UBI is for Universal, so I assume that every adult, at minimum, would get it. Or did I miss something?

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