California approves $35M plan for nation's first state-funded UBI
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IMO this will taint the ubi experiment overall. Universal means Bill gates and Bezos also receive their $1000/mo…
For example, if you're randomly selecting 100 people the odds of getting someone in the 1% are ~2/3. Making UBI payments to someone in the 1% would likely kill this experiment.
If a ubi program is universal that means the wealthy can’t complain that the poor are the only one being it.
> IMO this will taint the ubi experiment overall.
Nothing in the article makes it sound like this was meant to be a "UBI experiment", and I think the goal of actually helping people who are leaving the foster-care system is valuable whether or not it demonstrates anything about actual UBI.
UBI only works when it's 1) Universal (even to rich people) and 2) When it's funded by dismantling some/all of the existing welfare state.
What change do you think would take more than five years to see?
I think this is going to be a nigh insurmountable hurdle. To be upfront, I do not support UBI and I am extremely skeptical of it. But plenty of my friends on 'the left' adore the idea.
I don't believe the same people who champion a UBI would suddenly become cold and say to a disabled recipient, "No, you will not get extra money because of your special needs. You will get nothing else because we dismantled your welfare benefits in order to give everyone a UBI."
The response, then, would to be adjust the UBI payment amount for individuals with special needs to make up for the loss of those other welfare payments they needed to live. But to do that you would still need some sort of bureaucracy in order to assess claims and increase the payout. So in the end, can you even say you've replaced welfare with a UBI?
Having UBI means those organizations can be more focused and targeted, leading to better help for individuals in need.
Yep, I’ve been saying this forever. Once UBI is implemented you’re going to hear countless sob stories about how <some unexpected event occurred> and now the UBI recipient can’t afford food or rent. So there will be a push to implement some sort of emergency backstop behind UBI for these situations. And then a number of people will learn to exploit this system for extra bucks by claiming some sort of emergency, every single month.
The problem with all these feel good social programs is that the proponents always assume that everyone will behave properly and follow the rules as intended. They never account for the 10-20% of people who just want to game the system and ultimately cause its downfall.
No social program in the world ever accounted for fraud, and every one of them has suffered a terrifying downfall. Where once prospered the Kingdom of Sweden now only a barren crater remains, laid to waste by naive social programs.
Your estimate is off by an order of magnitude or two. Welfare programs have fraud rates in ranging from tenths of a percent to a couple of percentage points[1]. Most of that fraud is actually conducted by businesses that are serving customers who receive benefits.
[1] https://ivn.us/2014/04/01/really-responsible-welfare-fraud
Sounds like a No True Scotsman fallacy to me. There are multiple UBI designs, and this is just one of them. There is no one "true" UBI.
> When it's funded by dismantling some/all of the existing welfare state.
The $500 to $1000 a month in the OP would barely cover the premiums of a shitty healthcare plan on the individual market. It wouldn't even touch the actual costs of care or deductible, and those costs increase every year.
Why does everyone lack foresight in regards to where UBI will eventually lead? People are just going to keep voting for the guy promising more and more UBI bucks. Yeah maybe $1000 isn’t much, but give it a few election cycles.
My reasoning is that if the UBI collection and payout system cannot keep up with the market, the next logical step for the government is to nationalize the production and issue goods accordingly.
Edit: Let's say a pack of toilet paper goes from $10 to $20 due to inflation and the manufacturer raising prices because they are forced to pay workers higher wages (let's assume working in a toilet paper factory is terrible work and you could just live on UBI instead of working in a paper mill), and because the corporation also has to pay higher taxes to support UBI. The government can increase the UBI payout to make up for this - in the short term at least. But the price will continue to rise because the money has to come from somewhere and if you just print it inflation speeds up. But what if you get around this problem by issuing vouchers for toilet paper rather than issuing dollars that can be used on toilet paper? You solve the inflation problem as 1 roll = 1 roll. You can even lower each UBI payout because now you don't need to factor in the TP expense. This same thinking can be applied to other goods.
This is key. To go even further (at the risk of being a little political) The best way I heard UBI described (by economically conservative individuals in support of it) was that it was simply a readjustment of tax brackets so that lower incomes end up paying a negative tax [receiving money]. While not perfectly mathematically correct, it's an analogy. And it's important to keep that analogy in mind, because if UBI were to hypothetically be implemented in the US, it would simply be withheld accordingly by the employer as income taxes in higher paying jobs where such taxes would cancel out UBI money.
I have found that my friends who are unfamiliar with UBI tend to respond better to the idea of "_negative taxes_ for lower income earners" than "Universal [welfare]/Basic Income"
To be clear, I'm not trying to advocate for or against UBI, I'm simply trying to explain the idea from a different perspective.
And depending on how it's implemented, there'll be a segment of the population whose net UBI will be zero, so you'll save most of the processing costs of handling income tax and UBI.
That's overly vague and also wrong; What is fundamentally necessary is that the benefit cliffs of existing social welfare programs are eliminated, which requires that any effective benefit reduction be made gradual and distant from the low-end of the income spectrum.
The general way of doing this is:
(1) Making the benefit nominally universal across a population qualified by basic community membership traits (e.g., citizenship or legal residency),
(2) Replacing any means-tested benefit programs (non-means-tested social welfare programs may or may not be replaced, but are not critical to replace for the basic function of UBI, whereas means-tested programs are critical to replace.)
(3) Funding most of the cost (benefit plus administrative savings of displacing means-tested social welfare programs generally will not suffice for the benefit levels to functionally replace existing programs since the target population is much larger) with high-end taxes (e.g., in a system like the US systems, equalizing capital gains with normal income taxes, adding additional high-end brackets, etc.)
#1 and #3 are slightly different together than your #1, since the actual (that is, net) benefit (even discounting displaced programs) isn't actually universal, since some at the high end are net payers, and #2 is more specific than your #2 as yo which parts of the existing welfare state are essential to replace.
Temporary cash payments to people who are currently one of pregnant or recently out of foster care aren’t, even approximately, a UBI.
EDIT: If there are no means tests (and there is no indiciation in the article that that is a restriction on the county programs this will fund, its not a direct state program), its approximately a situation-tested social benefit program, otherwise its just a situationally-limited means-tested welfare program.
Let's fix and create problems along the way.
Ray Dalio did a write up of UBI as well. https://www.economicprinciples.org/downloads/Primer-on-Unive...
Andrew Yang wrote up a good book over the topic with "The War on Normal People" that covers UBI more in depth. His interview with Ben Shapiro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DHuRTvzMFw) and Joe Rogan covers it well also. I like his ideology and it seems well thought out.
We, I, have been so ingrained of thinking that capitalism is the best thing since swiss cheese, and it seems like socialism has some good aspects that we can adopt from as well.