Doesn't it though? You create a floor, so that anyone with a miserable job can say "screw you" and quit and go start their own business without having to worry about how they're going to make rent before the new business starts making money, and you get a lot more competition. More smaller companies instead of fewer bigger companies. And the big companies would have to pay more to get some people to not do that, so you get less inequality.
How isn't that solving the problem?
$1k/month worth of UBI wouldn't even cover average rent for a single person in any of the ~20 most populated cities in the US.
$1k/month doesn't quite even cover the cost of child daycare for a single child, in most of the US.
$1k/month of UBI is barely even ~50% of the current minimum wage in much of the US (a minimum wage that currently is so low, that it doesn't even cover bare-minimum cost of living either). The UBI is so low, it doesn't even give people the freedom to leave the lowest-paying legal job a typical person could have.
$1k/month doesn't cover average rent in the most populated cities because the most populated cities have the highest rents and its purpose is not to make you average, it's to provide a floor. Supplying enough for the lowest rent in the lowest cost of living place is sufficient for that, and if you want more you can go get a job or find some other way to make money -- which the UBI continues to supplement, so it doesn't even have to pay very much.
It's not supposed to make it so you can live a happy life for a hundred years without ever working. It's just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table, and give you a lot more runway when you're trying to start a new business.
My point is that $1k/month does not do this. Hell, minimum wage is approximately 1.5x to 2x greater than UBI (depending on the area), and even it does not quite take "starving and freezing to death" off the table.
"Working Homelessness" is a thing - https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel... and https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless...
You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.
I live in the Midwest, and this is simply not an accurate description of Midwest finances. These people who live on $12k/yr are either already asset rich (i.e., own their own house/car/etc) or are having their friends/family/roommates or the state pick up some of their living expenses, in one way or another. If they don't, they are literally dying of poverty.
According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line, even for a single adult with no children living in the Midwest (Michigan).
The federal poverty line for the lower 48 states is $12,490. Is your objection only that you want to make the UBI $12,500 instead of $12,000?
Notice that you could also make up the other $500 by working a minimum wage job for less than two weeks out of the year.
Yes it is.
> it's insufficient local housing
Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing. If you have one you, ipso facto, have the other.
California has insufficient low-end wages (and poverty support programs) given the prices (not just for housing, though that's a particularly significant aspect of the issue) created by the wealth of California's high-end workers and capitalists.
They're not. If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing. It doesn't matter how much money people have because whoever has the most would just bid up housing prices so they can have it and there would be people left at the bottom without it.
Whereas if you had enough housing for twice as many people as actually live there then housing would be very inexpensive and even people not making very much money would be able to afford it, because getting a unit wouldn't require outbidding someone with a lot more money than you.
California has several times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless people. California doesn't have a hard shortage of housing units, certain people that need housing in California have insufficient material means to convince the people that own existing unoccupied housing units to rent or sell to them.
It also fails on the other end because there are many alternatives to local housing other than homelessness, like selecting less local housing with an unreasonably long commute or living in units designed for fewer occupants in violation of the fire code. You essentially have unaccounted for over-occupancy. People having more money doesn't solve any of those problems without more housing for the money to buy, and interferes with solving homelessness as well because higher wages in general could cause people in those situations to move to existing unoccupied units before the existing homeless do.
No, what you get is more and more people who will say „srew you, why should I go and do stuff when I get money for doing f* all”. The people here on HN and those millionaires / billionaires are an outlier. An average shop clerk, security warden will not go and start their own business after saying „screw you”.
I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.
Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes), that will only give an equivalent of a minimum wage to everyone (ok 20% above national minimum wage but some states have it higher)... how far does that get you?
You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month, to say nothing of arrangements that involve roommates or shared facilities or couples who would then have a second UBI.
> I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.
You're forgetting the possibility for supplemental income. Combine the UBI with a part time job and you could live just outside of New York City and spend the other half of your time on the business for as long as it takes until it makes enough for you to quit the part time job.
There is also a whole lot of work that really doesn't care about location at all. You can do software development in Kansas if you want to, as well as anything else that involves selling your product over the internet.
> Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes)
The marginal rate isn't what causes revolts, it's the effective rate. Middle class people don't care about paying $12,000 in tax if they also get a $12,000 UBI. Upper middle class people aren't going to revolt over a difference between the two of an amount similar to what they pay already for the existing welfare system we would no longer need.
And the whole point of using VAT is that billionaires and international corporations can't avoid it.
... because there is currently no program in Austin whereby residents each get $1,000 of free money month.
But if everybody in the country gets the same UBI then people are going to move from where to where exactly?
If the answer is from places with higher housing costs to places with lower housing costs, I think you're going to find that there's more than enough empty space in the middle of nowhere to satisfy all of that demand without significant rent increases.
The entire reason people are setting up shop in Austin is that it's so much less expensive than San Francisco. If landlords in Austin tried to raise rents then people would go to Kansas City or Buffalo or Louisville.
Some of the landlords would figure out that it's more profitable to have tenants at lower rents than higher rents and no tenants.
In the real world, most people can't just relocate their life on a whim, and the majority of citizens are more-or-less locked into a specific area for long periods of time, for a whole bunch of reasons. (Employer, Spouse, Children, Extended Family, Networks, etc)
It's not impossible to relocate or anything. But most people can't do so, and the few who can usually can't do so easily. It's not like window shopping for cars or clothes, these markets are effectively soft-Monopolies.
If landlords in Austin raised rents, most people would just have to eat it, unless it got to dystopian levels that forced them to relocate.
There are a thousand local landlords. If they all decided to double rents, maybe only 5% of the local population would move out, but then 5% of the landlords would have empty properties. They're individually better off to get someone in there at a lower rent than have an empty unit, so they advertise a lower rent and take one of the tenants from a landlord across the street. Now that landlord has the empty unit and they do the same thing.
Which means Kansas City is competition for Austin even if 95% of the people there would never actually move. (Assuming cities where the job market, amenities and so on are similar.)
Also, when rents are higher, there is incentive to build new housing to capture the profits.
Rents only get high when they're not just eager to arbitrarily raise rents but somehow colluding to constrain supply, which is hard for thousands of landlords to do except through zoning. But that's completely independent from how much money the local people have. There are cities that have the same median income and higher rents because the local government imposes housing supply constraints.
If everyone in the US was given $1 million per month, do you think that rent in Austin would go up in absolute terms?
If yes, by what mechanism can you imagine this effect is caused?
If no, I don’t know what to say.
The implied way to do it is, of course, by printing the money. Which would indeed cause inflation in not just rents but everything. But how does that apply to the real case when the money doesn't come from printing it?
This is not accurate. Rent prices have little to do with supply and demand, and are primarily driven by how much money tenants have (or more accurately, how much tenants can be bled for before they give up and leave).
This is why rent rises even when supply is greater than demand, and why rents rise even in places where demand is falling dramatically.
That's demand.
How else do you explain housing costs being lower in Austin (available land, less restrictive zoning) than New York City despite Austin having a higher median income?
Providing a "cash injection" doesn't require the UBI. It only requires taxing the rich. But the rich - yes, they mostly CAN actually leave the country to escape taxation, and operate from elsewhere, they can move their assets - increasingly virtual such as intellectual properly - onto offshore entities too... So there's really no option of taxing the rich.
I'll rephrase in case I've been unclear.
How, or have, you considered that if everyone gets an extra $1k/mo that a huge swath of Americans will just spend it every month? When they spend that money it does not disappear. Some goes to taxes and gets redistributed there. Some gets taken by the service providers (grocery stores, gas stations, cable/cell companies, etc) some gets vacuumed up into the murky world of private equity, some flows into the black market, etc, etc, etc. That money keeps flowing and keeps generating tax revenue. This is economic velocity.
The question I have is how have you examined this effect and found it to be unlikely to spur an increase in quality of life for tens of millions of Americans?
... except that part where $1,000 per month per person in the US comes out to about $4 trillion, which is 100% of all taxes collected.
There is no universe in which this much money can be given to every citizen in the US without creating new money.
Doing the accounting in a naive way is also misleading with a UBI, because it's effectively a tax credit. If you paid $15,000 in taxes and received a $12,000 UBI, you're really in the same situation as if you paid $3000 in taxes and had no UBI. The fact that you're nominally paying $12,000 more in taxes doesn't actually affect you because you get all that back.
Wrong. UBI financed by monopoly taxes makes rents go rock bottom. High uncompeted markup prices - Rents - are by definition caused by some kind of monopoly situation, because they are not competed away. You need to tax monopolies and not call it tax but a 'privilege fee' and reinvest the money into infrastructure or resistribute as dividends - which is UBI basically.
There is NO WAY anything like UBI would ever work without curbing monopoly pricing because any money raised by income tax, VAT or any other means freely given to people will end up rising up rents and monopoly prices even higher.
Probably better to just get rid of the monopolies, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions on density so that housing supply can respond to demand.
To me it feels both politically impossible, morally unjustifiable, and socially bullshit. "Get too many people very angry for no benefit at all".
Reducing housing costs helps the indigent elderly at least as much as it does the average person. Who it hurts is the affluent elderly who own a big mansion and would get whacked harder than usual by a reduction in its value, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to have a lot of sympathy for rich people trying to profit from artificial scarcity.
Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you?
I agree with you that money is power, but you are not going to stop the existence of Billionaires and Trillionaires. That would need to be a coordinated global effort.
Can you explain this, as this doesn’t appear to be backed up by IRS stats on effective rates & total revenue.
1. Are taxed at a much lower rate, and,
2. Are only taxed when the gains are "realized," e.g. when you sell at a profit.
As a result, if you have a large amount of wealth, your net worth can increase dramatically while being untaxed (if you don't sell) or taxed very low (if you sell some percentage of the gains — and only the sold percentage gets taxed, the rest doesn't). Depending on your investment strategy you can also play games with taxes, e.g. when rebalancing your portfolio, try to mostly sell your shares that have lost value, so that you put a loss on the books rather than a gain and are thus untaxed (or even get tax credits).
That's why Warren Buffett talks about paying less in taxes than his secretary.
The only way wealth can increase (in a usuable liquid form at least) is through income, which is already taxed.
If I eat beans and rice for 10 years to help save for a awesome retirement, I should be able to save that money.
Taxing upon realization also makes sense to me, but the very low long-term capital gains tax makes less sense to me. If you made a million dollars, I don't care if you made it via investment or by working for someone — you should support society in the same degree.
That they are taxed at a reduced rate is true but doesn't invalidate the fact they are still income.
And regardless of semantics, the original point still stands: relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, don't even pay income tax. This is trivially true: if your liquid net worth increases by $1 billion dollars, and you made that money via income, you would be taxed (depending on state) up to nearly 50% of those gains. If you made it via capital gains, you would be taxed at zero. Since very rich people make most of their money via capital gains, what little net worth increases they make via "income" pale in comparison to the gains from capital investments. Thus, they pay effectively no income tax relative to their wealth, which is large. If they make 1.2 billion dollars in liquid net worth, and only 0.2 billion is classified as income, they're paying an effective tax rate of about 12% in CA instead of 49.3% (what they would pay in CA if their gains were categorized as income). If only 0.1 billion was income, they're paying 6%. If they "only" made 50 million dollars of income that year, and the rest was classified as long-term cap gains, they're paying 3% tax.
For the record — I'm not saying we should tax unrealized capital gains! This is a very complex subject and changing the tax code in that way could have far-reaching, potentially very negative side effects on the US economy; for example: we wouldn't tax unrealized illiquid asset gains, right? That would be unfair: if it's illiquid, you may literally be unable to pay the taxes on your supposed gains. But that encourages mass migration of high-net-worth individuals' assets into illiquid assets like real estate (since by and large they don't need immediate access to the capital), and out of liquid assets like company stocks, which would drive up housing costs and reduce available capital for US companies. Not only that — it prioritizes illiquid assets over liquid ones, which is good for rich people who can park money on illiquid assets and don't need to spend it short-term, but bad for everyone else who actually may need to spend their money. Not exactly the outcome we want! In general tax is super hard and rich people will pay very smart people to game the tax code for them.
But capital gains being only up to 18% compared to income at up to 37% at the federal level (with similar breakdowns by state) seems pretty off.
Capital gains are a subset of income, taxed via income tax at, in some cases (mostly, “long-term” gains) preferential rates.
> There's a set of taxes called "income taxes,"
Capital gains are part of those taxes.
> and the rules are the same for anything classified as income
No, they aren't. There are all kinds of special cases with income. Capital gains are one: they are income, included in AGI (adjusted gross income) which effects eligibility for various tax credits and deductions, but in certain, but not all, cases taxed at lower rate than ordinary income, as low as zero percent for the portion of long-term gains within the tax bracket qualified for 12% rate on ordinary income.
Where are you getting this information? From what I can find, the top 20% of Americans pay 87% of income taxes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87...
Why stop at 20%? Map peoples’ wealth on a normal curve and then look at which parts of the curve pay the bulk of income tax. Saying the top 20% of income earners pay 87% of income taxes says very little, actually, about who, exactly is paying the bulk of income tax relative to wealth. I mean probably most people on hacker news are in the top 20% income earners in the US for crying out loud. Are most of us wealthy? Not relative to how much wealth is out there.
Income tax is collected as a percentage of people's income, I'm not sure why you're referencing wealth here. And judging tax as a percentage of wealth is not a very sound approach:
* You have someone that makes $50,000 and has lived frugally and saved up $500,000 over the span of decades.
* You have someone that makes $250,000 a year and spends nearly all of their money as they earn it, and so only has $50,000 saved.
The former will pay $4,342 in federal income taxes (filing as single) and thus pay under 1% of their wealth in income taxes. The latter will pay $58,424 in federal income tax and thus pay over 100% of their wealth in income taxes. Am I to understand that this situation is unfair because the former is paying a smaller percentage of their wealth as compared to the latter, and that the former should be paying more than the latter?
Judging taxes as a function of people's wealth is not a sound approach because people's wealth has much more to do with their financial decisions than their income. Why should frugal people who save more be taxed more heavily than someone who makes as much (or even more) but spends their money?
This portion of your comment seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of income vs. assets:
> ...they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.
Property (in other words, the assets people own minus their debt) is wealth. Talking about how the source of wealth is derived from property is nonsensical - wealth and property are two words for the same thing: net assets.
Income is the delta of people's wealth. If you have an annual income of $X then your wealth is increasing by at most $X each year. Gains from increased value of assets (capital gains) are another source of wealth. These are taxed, too, but at the time that the assets are sold rather than immediately. Inheritance is another source of wealth and that is taxed as well.
Income is taxed because income, not property, is the source of people's wealth. It's valid to think of "income" as short for "incoming property".
Sure, and that's why we need a mechanism to redistribute that wealth... like a UBI.
> a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay.
Yang proposes to exempt basic goods from the VAT, but more importantly, the central appeal of a VAT is that tax evasion is made more difficult!
A VAT naturally creates an audit trail of both parties in every transaction where value is added. If one party is incentivized to report, for example via a tax credit for the end consumer, then everyone else in the chain of crediting is incentivized to do so also.
If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.
The thing about VAT is that it is multilateral, and applies to many types of business-to-business transactions as well to business-to-consumer, so all the suppliers in the chain pay their share, not only the consumer.
And, given by pure numbers, the value provided by VAT paid by business is pretty significant. In some implementations (such as my country one), business share of VAT can not be less than final consumer's VAT, because consumer has paid VAT only once, while any producing business, was paying VAT for any transaction by any supplier.
The argument about aligning VAT against the poor, is that, given corrupt government being in power, some business can easily avoid paying VAT, or pay only small percentage of it.
This was (and, to some extent, still is) the case in my country (Ukraine), due to existence of so-called "VAT Refunds" scheme, which allowed many oligarchs to concentrate big amounts of value during 90s-00s. The scheme is easy as using non-market practices such as paying less VAT than their competitors, and being not punished then due to law loopholes passed by cronies in the state legislation.
The new governments, after 2014 Maidan revolution, being pressured by country's civil community, and also the international community, have started to remove many types of "VAT Refunds" scheme loopholes. That's why many oligarchs already went bust, and many are going to, just because their enterprises are now required to pay their share of VAT, and can not survive competition in changed reality.
So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.
> So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.
This kind of kills the VAT being feasible here in the US. We have crazy amounts of lobbying and legal loopholes and while the US gvt is powerful, that's somewhat antithetical to the founding ideals of that.
A flat value added tax is regressive, but a VAT itself is not inherently regressive. Imagine if we have a VAT on yachts and nothing else, does that disproportionately affect the rich or the poor?
That's why Yang is proposing to exempt basic goods and raise the rate on some luxury items.
Even under a flat 10% VAT paired with the UBI, you would only be worse off if you spend $120,000 yearly on items with a 100% pass through (the IMF's estimates on the average pass through under a VAT are much lower than this).
> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
You are going to need to specify a better alternative then. Again, a VAT has inherent properties that make it highly auditable and therefore easier to administer. A wealth tax, in comparison, is much more subject to misreporting because it relies on asset valuation.
> And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.
Do you want wealth redistribution or not?
Yang wants to give individuals legal ownership of their own data and control over how it is used, so I'm not so sure that most of those California billionaires are all that fond of him anyway.
It seems to me that many otherwise "normal" middle class people have one area, their hobby, where they own luxury products. That might be a sports car, a horse, a sailboat, ski trips, etc. Might a VAT tax on luxury goods make those products out of reach for the middle class?
While I can understand taxing a billionaire who buys luxury products in every area of their life, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for someone to have one area that they choose to focus their resources.
https://www.yang2020.com/policies/capital-gain-carried-inter...
Nobody? They'll buy yachts abroad.
Sure you are. Joe Teach pays $5000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $5000/year is being transferred to him. Carlton Moneypenny pays $50,000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $40,000/year is being transferred away from him.
> much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium
But then you would collect more VAT at the same rate, which would fund a larger UBI. By the time that reaches steady state it's a wash.
On top of that, VAT is great for people who are in debt (i.e. the poor), because no more income tax means they can pay down their existing debt with money they would have otherwise lost to income tax.
> Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices.
The party who pays more of the tax is the party whose alternatives have gotten worse instead of better. For an individual, saving has just gotten more attractive relative to spending, so Amazon will have to keep the price of that stupid knickknack lower in order to get people to still buy it instead of banking the money and collecting interest on it to spend next year.
Meanwhile it's now the case that the tax applies to Amazon and not just their smaller, less international competitors, so Amazon would start losing business to them if they don't keep prices low by eating more of the tax.
> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.
Not really. The primary problem is that shifting profits to other jurisdictions with lower taxes is easy to do and hard to prevent, and then there are no "profits" in the jurisdiction with the progressive tax, which turns the "progressive" tax into a massively regressive tax since the richest pay nothing.
The best way to fix it is to make everyone pay the same rate (so the rich can't avoid it) and then make it progressive by giving everyone a fixed refund (UBI), which gives you the effective rate curve a progressive income tax is supposed to have except that international corporations can't avoid it by declaring profits in Ireland.
It might not solve is but it's certainly a ding in the arc of the current status quo.
The problem with no floor is it creates fear. Lots of it. When you fear losing your job and/or your home your view of the world gets very narrow. Your options limited. Availability of opportunity and resources cause you to make bad decisions (e.g., blaming minority X or Y for your fate).
It's true UBI will not solve the power imbalance. But it can be a step in the direction of undermining the status quo.
It’s always puzzling to me when people equate wealth with evil. Why the unnecessary moralizing? Just say “concentrated wealth in the hands of the few has the potential to cause systemic societal harm”
No need to paint it as a battle of good vs evil, it severely diminishes the substance of your point.
But my point is that no tiny handful of people should be allowed to have that kind of power, whether they're evil or not.
A rather large chunk of billionaire's money is used to pay for a huge portion of the government (directly). Not to mention the amount of extra wealth in the world that (some of them) have created, which also turns into tax revenue.
Perhaps there were other motives, but his views lined up best with Trump.
I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
> I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.
Yang’s got the dynamic of federal bureaucrats down correctly. It’s the same ones I went through and why I left federal service a decade ago. Bernie’s commitment to service is incredibly inspiring but relying upon other people to be more like Bernie is not a plan, nor is relying upon more executives to be like Yang is not a plan either.
I’m not an either/or kind of person and see Bernie and Yang working together on legislation as a real, material step forward.
Likewise, how is ubi regressive? What would a progressive solution to poverty be?
Arbitrarily set and legislated into oblivion means testing thresholds and the administrative overhead of checking in constantly plus the shame of assistance appears to be a serious problem. Similar happens with EITC which most people eligible for do not claim.
See also how awful state-run TANF has been in Mississippi. UBI nationwide could be thought of as taking back control of programs from states that have dismantled the nets already.
This is a tough issue that has a lot of dimensions of discussion that won’t be covered respectfully in an HN thread exactly for the gravity of the problem
Another effect to consider is where do all the staff go to get new jobs? Many will find the private sector exceptionally difficult to integrate into after decades in public benefits work.
Yang’s website says the plan will rely on poor people electing not to get other social safety net benefits. People will end up without healthcare and without food if there are not programs in place to address those problems specifically.
I was giving you the benefit
> without healthcare and without food
What? I've never heard him say this and seens like something he wouldn't say given his stance on wellbeing. Also, you can use UBI for food.
The only thing I've heard is people on welfare programs would be able to choose between continuing those or stopping them and switching to UBI. Nothing about healthcare and with these the people get to choose themselves.
The point of public healthcare and food programs, among the other programs he’s talking about not having, is that even if you run out of money you can still buy food because the food stamps are reserved for doing so.
I know you all like to imagine everyone is rational like you, but what will you do when someone has spent everything and cannot feed themselves? Or has spent everything because of an emergency and their healthcare coverage lapses and they are ill?
Give me a break.
Creating systems which lower the costs of living (eg. public transit, below market public housing) benefit low income persons and aren't as easily erodible.
It is kind of right but essentially wrong. In any society with the size of more than hundreds of people, it always has a power structure, and always has a small number of people concentrate power way more than others. It is not a problem with super rich people. Even in all the Communist countries (Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.) where everyone is super poor and there is no millionaire, power structure and concentration of power still exists and is way more cruel than in a market-driven society.
Of course UBI doesn't solve this, because there is no way to solve this. Even if you nuke the modern world to stone age, power structure and concentration of power will 100% appear again and keep growing when you have a team, a tribe, a city, a nation.
Obviously power structures and concentration of power always exist in some form, but that doesn't mean we should never try to rein it in on occassion.
With current social support programs the government does get to choose who gets what. But with a UBI, every adult would get the same amount, effectively removing the government's ability to choose who gets benefits.
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying, I don't know.
Many people add on the mistake of thinking they will belong to the class of enlightened despots. You haven't said enough for me to tell if you're one of those.
Money isn’t power. Power is power. If Putin became bankrupt tonight, he’d still be one of the most powerful people on earth tomorrow morning. Power is the capacity to have others do what you want, including handing you their money when you need it. Case in point: how many million-dollar lottery winners ended up having any nontrivial influence on their community or state? Nearly 0.
As you say, money helps. But there limits to what money can do.
Political power and capital are intertwined, but neither is above the other in a direct hierarchical relationship, because both can hold a gun to each other's head. So long as the state keeps the right to property, and it almost always will, capital has nothing to fear.
This defines pretty much every social system we ever had, unless you propose some sort of decentralized utopia, you need to trust power in the hands of a few. Money is just a vehicle of this particular system.
The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.
UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing.
Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration.
Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.