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.