I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/refundabl...
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
There is little control.
About that kind of fraud I never heard anything like that in Sweden, but I would assume social services checks if children are attending school and if they are not, they investigate the parents. So this kind of fraud shouldn't be possible long-term. Social services would get called if a child doesn't show up for school or is not registered in any schools pretty quickly.
I also think that home-schooling is illegal, but not sure on the specifics.
The thing with these kind of benefits is that the bureucracy involved in dispensing them often costs close (or more) than the money dispensed. The system is more efficient if you just let everyone have it. It is one of the core arguments of UBI vs Welfare.
In this case the benefit still counts as welfare, not UBI obviously. However since the dispensing of the benefit is so simple (registered with tax agency, which is required to have an ID) it carries the same argument. If UBI was a thing in Sweden it would work the exact same way sans a check for parent-child relationship.
Also the amount per child grows slightly with every child up to 4 I think.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the scam of collecting benefits via fake or stolen identities?
Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.
In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
Don't they always? As much as I despise the modern Republican party and Trump in particular, I think they're much better at messaging and group consensus. Considering Bernie Sanders' electoral performance, there were (are?) definitely opportunities.
If your only concern is people who are scamming the system, UBI ensures they are not scamming by definition. (we can debate if that is a good solution or not - a very different topic). However the main concern should be people who need help, and a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
This is true, but there is plenty of evidence in the disability sphere that it's more cost-effective to give people with disabilities money up front because they can spend it on their own needs better than government programmes.
Think of it like a business that wants to make sure WFH is comfortable for its employees. Many companies now just give a grant up front for monitors, chairs, etc.
If they don't do that they need someone to admin/spreadsheet what monitor is best value for the company, what chairs, and investigate perhaps all the accessibility needs that might need to become a matter of policy for the firm. Updates to employee contracts. List goes on. And at the end, people will still complain because they think the company chose the wrong chair for them.
Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.
This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.
It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Per the same USA Spending .gov site, military spending by year has been:
2024: $1,358,253,371,219 14.03%
2023: $1,297,012,666,574 13.90%
2022: $1,160,975,500,606 12.85%
2021: $1,117,832,172,120 11.11%
2020: $1,098,916,637,102 12.03%
2019: $1,060,561,779,405 15.97%
2018: $995,628,286,613 15.77%
2017: $931,355,381,711 15.39%
One obvious scam in this case would be to convince the system you are more than one person.
I think you underestimate people's greed and inventiveness.
Medicaid
FY 2023 Budget: $900.3b ($620b federal, $280b state) [1]
FY 2023 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): 5% ($45b) [2]
SNAP
FY 2024 Budget: $100.3b [3]
FY 2024 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): $6.5b [3]
TANF
FY2024 Budget: $31.5b ($16.5b federal, $15b state) [4]
FY2023 Budget spent on program overhead: %10.1 ($3.2b) [5]
Total Admin Spending $54.7b -> $169 per person in the US
So not totally negligible but also not exactly a basic income
[1] (https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending)
[2] (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640) See figure 4
[3] (https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...)
[4] (https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf)
[5] (https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tan...)
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
Public or private? I've never seen "the left" criticize admin overhead in public services.
McKinsey estimates healthcare profit pools will reach $819 billion in 2027.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Politicians need to win elections every 2-6 years, and honestly most of them aren't that bright.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
Two mitigations would be gradual adjustments, and a willingness to delay reductions a bit.
People shouldn't be sweating bullets about help being pulled prematurely as a direct result of trying to get past the need for it. Or have the marginal impact of increasing their earned income actually reduce total help+income.
I know somebody in an extremely bad health situation, and dealing with both of those perverse issues. Attempting employment would carry a lot risk. And with kids to be cared for, playing roulette in an already challenging situation is a real barrier. (In this case, it isn't government help, but a situation with similar logic.)
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.
Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.
Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.
Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.
Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.
Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
The Clintons writing books and giving lectures is also irrelevant.
They don't cater heavily to poor people for votes. They use lies and misinformation to get poor to vote against their interests.
If the poor were actually being catered to like you seem to think they are, they'd actually have their basic needs met.
Why are we stuck with Medicaid and Medicare instead of having universal healthcare? It's not cost. We're currently paying more than other rich countries (which answers your 'domonating government expenditures' comment). Because the status quo helps the rich.
Single payer means perverse incentives endemic to socialism.
It's actually easy to prove that this isn't true. Not even close.
What do you define as a "true UBI"? Take that annual number and multiply it by the population of the United States. That's how much a "true UBI" program would have to spend annually.
If we took a poverty-level wage of $15.5K annually and gave it to every person, that would require $5.4 Trillion, excluding any overhead of sending out the money.
That's more than all of the federal tax revenue combined. Even if we took every dollar paid in federal taxes and gave it to every person in the United States with 100% efficiency, divided evenly, it would still be below what's considered poverty-level wages.
I think a lot of people have "feel it in my bones" beliefs about UBI that they haven't stopped to check with some simple math. Actually giving everyone a lot of money is extremely expensive.
If US GDP is ~30 trillion, the program would have to capture ~20% of that to achieve your target.
Do check my math, I’m not sure I’ve got this right.
That's correct.
You'd have to raise taxes across the board. There is a lingering assumption that we can tax billionaires and get UBI, but more simple math shows that won't work either. Even if you seized 100% of the net worth (not just cash in the bank) of all US billionaires, you couldn't provide poverty-level wages to everyone for very long.
In practice, this means that a UBI program would turn into a tax rate program. You might "receive" $15K in UBI, but your middle-class taxes would go up by $20K per year. So you're technically getting UBI, but your taxes have gone up to pay for it to go to people in lower tax brackets.
> that said, I'd only support it for natural/born citizens.
directly in contradiction to the spirit of UBI that you endorsed immediately preceding it?
If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
Perhaps you could try paying them more?
Seriously, I can do this all day.
To address your question as why this is allowed to continue, you'd have to ask those within the US and countries that allow it to happen.
Australia addressed this in 1907 or so with the Harvester decision and other related law cases that became foundation to working conditions.
https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
Human nature dictates that, while there may be "many", they would never even get close to being a majority. Hardly anyone wants to "just scrape by".
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
The only one of those that's justifiable for UBI is some sort of ID requirement to prevent double-claiming.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
That said, the random person buying grocery is paying a corp here.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Source: happened in a city near me.
Jesus, talk about a strawman
If your can't afford to feed your kids in school you don't deserve to be called a first world country.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
Funny enough, I _did_ build a house in the countryside, and as an immigrant, but only by buying a very old house and refurbishing/extending it. I hardly view this as a claim on the public purse; I imported my job (by working remote for a US company), dumped hundreds of thousands of Euro in to Ireland (half a million just in taxes), then built a house after working with asinine planners and finally sold it at a huge loss. So Ireland got a bunch of money and another house. They're welcome.
As far as Ireland's demography, I don't see how people immigrating (mainly to the cities) changes what I said? Ireland is noteworthy in that it _also_ has a huge problem with emigration; it treats nurses terribly and more or less pushes them out the country, for instance.
Personally, I have some sympathy with these types of laws. As someone whose home town in the UK became greatly gentrified before I was able to get on the housing ladder, I find myself living a little way out from where I want to be. Some people are "Anywheres" whilst others are "Somewheres". I am very much a "Somewhere" and need to be based around where I grew up and where my early memories reside. My sister is an "Anywhere" and lives in sunnier climes, apparently with no sentiment for where she grew up.
What "Anywheres" tend to take for granted is they usually have a somewhere they can go back to, but the displaced "Somewhere" does not.
BTW, I certainly did not mean to imply anything about your use of a public purse.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
Or at least that's the reason they claim.
I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment.
Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.