> UBI is how you make sure everyone has Fuck-You money
Erm no, it's probably only barely what you need to survive, nothing close to what people refer to as FU Money.
Erm no, it's probably only barely what you need to survive, nothing close to what people refer to as FU Money.
This is the key to FU Money, an increase in freedom since your base needs are met and secure; agreed that in common parlance it usually is applied to people that have so much money they can live like a king and say no to whatever they want.
He's living "frugally" as described in his article. I don't think that what's people expect from UBI when they talk about it.
Enough for mental health without the great of losing everything and being homeless.
One guy I worked with worked from 5am to 2pm in the mall bakery, took a nap in the backroom, the was a line cook from 4p-midnight. Mostly because of some debts and a situation that prevented his wife from working.
...which is exactly what UBI intends.
Electricity. Wifi. Fast internet. Air conditioning. Running water. Access to nutritious food and good medicine. Some of those are needs, others are not. The ones which are directly maintaining you in good health are needs.
Don't sacrifice your needs (8 hours of sleep a day, for example) for your wants (a shiny new iPhone or bigger apartment) over the years.
It's not black and white. As we give more and more UBI, we rebalance the power dynamic between employers and employees. It starts to obviate the need for minimum wage laws and unions, because people can start to ask for 30 hour work weeks, time off to raise their own kids, study a new career, contribute to science and open source software and so on. They'll be able to take more entrepreneurial risks, too. A society with UBI would have a lot more people contributing to gift economies.
In practice, it would have a similar impact on the books as a program that gave $1000/month to just the poor people. Giving the money to everybody and then taxing it back from most makes it seem much larger but makes it a wash in practice.
There is a huge amount of taxes that the ultra-wealthy are currently NOT paying. In fact, the vast majority of income taxes are actually paid by the lower and middle classes, because once you hit a certain level of income you have enough money to pay professionals to help you shelter your money and avoid taxes.
For example, Warren Buffet only paid $1.8 million in taxes in 2015, even though his wealth was worth 72 billion at the time. His wealth literally grew 12 billion that year, and he only paid $1.8 million in taxes.
That means he paid only 0.015% in taxes, in terms of wealth growth vs income taxes paid.
Meanwhile, someone earning $100K would have paid around 20% of their income...
In comparison top 10% of the Danish tax payers paid just 31.3% of the total income tax, despite Denmark having rather high taxation (the OECD method that puts it as #1 is controversial, but I pay e.g. a 42% marginal tax rate on any capital gains).
'share of the total taxes the rich pay'
And
'the percentage of their wealth the rich pay'
It may only take the rich 5% of their income to pay the 38.5% of total taxes because they're capturing so much of the value generated in America and hiding it whereever.
[0] US federal minimum wage