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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

$900/mo. is near the high-end of the feasible UBI range. If you want to live on your UBI, it's pretty much expected that you'd move to the lowest-cost feasible area, and content yourself with a somewhat dignified subsistence. UBI has by far the most potential as a supplemental income to low-skilled, entry-level or low-intensity work. The key aim is to make it seamless for people to enter or leave the job market as they choose, which removes the threat of exploitive "wage slavery".

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If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase.

If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI.

And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would work (which is one of the promises of promoters of UBI), meaning taxes would have more than double to make the payments.

The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.

"Doubling income taxes" sounds scary, but a large portion of the working population would roughy break even as the increase in taxes would simply be offset by the UBI they receive.

A negative income tax is probably the best way to implement a UBI as it would require only distributing money to those that are below the income threshold, and it would prevent political opponents from trotting out big scary numbers on how much it would cost, while ignoring the necessary accounting required to truly estimate the financial impacts.

I wonder how many businesses could survive doubling the federal income tax?

Probably a higher percentage than middle and upper middle class taxpayers could sustain doubling their federal taxes.

Given that businesses are taxed on profit rather than gross, probably nearly all of them. But most would move their headquarters to other countries where they can simply dodge those taxes (like many have already).

Likely not the very business owners that would benefit from UBI the most.

Thereby likely forcing those business owners to rely on UBI entirely for income, thus removing their upward mobility.

there is no feasibility limit for UBI. The limit is inflation and that is decided by the component costs of products.

For example if you put $30T into UBI, and everyone saved it, you wouldn't have any inflation.

Inflation isn't a limit on UBI either...

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