I don't see this happening. Basic income will be a terribly spartan existence (I estimate not more than $650/person/month with pretty generous guessestimating).

Anyone who works for the government (including teaching & military) with retirement benefits is not going to subsist on just UBI once they stop working.

This all depends on how many jobs are displaced due to automation, if 40% of our workforce ends up unemployed due to robots taking over their jobs it doesn't seem unreasonable to take 30% of the GDP to supply a BI program (which would give roughly 1/2 the median income to each person in the country if my math was right).

30% of GDP is almost double[1] the entire federal tax receipts currently. That means you're going to need to raise taxes to between 2x and 2.5x their current level in order to institute a program of that magnitude.

That does meet my bar of "unreasonable".

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

He's talking about a scenario where 40% is unemployed due to automation, that's pretty apocalyptic. If that can be dealt with pretty well with only a 2.5x raise in tax levels, that sounds good to me.

Taking federal taxes to 2.5x their current levels takes the top marginal rate over 100%, and that's before any state or local taxes are added.

Mathematically, that makes no sense.

> Taking federal taxes to 2.5x their current levels takes the top marginal rate over 100%,

You are confusing "federal taxes" with "federal income taxes" and assuming the only way to increase the latter is to multiply the existing marginal rates without changing the structure; since a one portion of the drive for UBI is to address concentration of returns in high-end income and capital gains, the natural first thing to do is to uncap payroll/self-employment taxes and tax capital income the same as labor income (both the taxes on labor income styled as "income tax" and those styled as "payroll tax". That -- alone -- more than doubles taxes on long-term capital gains.)

There's also other income that excluded from taxation or taxed favorably that is concentrated at the high-end that could be targetted.

Increasing tax on company profits is the more likely way of going about this instead of targeting the income tax specifically.

This whole theory hinges on automation taking a significant bite out of the workforce, which will raise profits in direct proportion to lower costs. If companies aren't paying their employees anymore, a portion of their proceeds should go to paying back society as a whole - after all, if there's nobody to buy their product then they are dead as a company.

If fewer and fewer people work, it makes sense to tax other things than income from work. Like capital gains.

This is not much different than the transition from agricultural to industrial age.

If 40% end up unemployed as a result of automation, then there should be a significant increase in new jobs in the automation industry.

The solution is retraining programs. Paying displaced workers UBI while they're retraining is a compassionate temporary solution, but not long-term.

Except there won't be jobs in this future. None. There will come a day when medical doctors, lawyers, and even computer programming can be done by AI, and automation. You can't retrain a workforce for a job that doesn't exist. Robot maintenance maybe? Not when robots repair robots/themselves.. Sounds sci-fi now, but it's looming.

Do away with minimum wage laws (no longer needed and no longer desirable with a UBI program in place, IMO), and 40% of the workforce won't end up unemployed/unemployable.

I'm fine with eliminating the minimum wage in a society with a UBI, wokers will be able to compete purely on value and wages will reflect as much - but the UBI needs to actually be a livable amount and not below current poverty / minimum wage levels.

> Basic income would solve that problem too, by replacing the state pension programs.

This doesn't actually fit very well with the conceptual basis of UBI as a replacement for means-tested benefit programs, as defined-benefit pensions are not means-tested benefits.

Though its true that a number (though not all) UBI proponents have either explicitly called for replacing existing Social Security-style retirement programs, or implicitly suggested that by including the existing cost of those programs as funds available for UBI.