We currently have intense income inequality in the world - pretty sure we can shave some off the top and the middle to help everyone live a healthier life.

Wealth isn’t fungible like that. A lot of recent wealth inequality was stocks rising.

That doesn’t mean that food production went up, or that more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are cloned, or anything of the sort.

It just means stocks went up.

Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other people, or working to import stuff. If people don’t work, you don’t get the stuff they provide.

To a certain extent you can sell off assets abroad and import stuff using a trade deficit. But that doesn’t work forever, and you can’t import haircuts or clean floors or construction labour or nurse shifts. At a certain point work is needed.

Oh, so maybe we should fund UBI by just stripping out the capital gains exemptions that allow insanely rich people to get insanely richer.

Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is transferable.

Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything. No one starves in America because there isn't enough corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for the home to be built.

These are all solvable problems.

I think the point is you cannot go infinitely far with that concept. Wealth allows you to get a share of the productive capacity of the world. Giving everyone a billion dollars does not automatically mean we have enough production capacity and land to have everyone live in a mansion.

Now we can certainly say that "hey maybe if these guys all didn't have such a big mansion or as many cars everyone else would be better off", but you have to be explicit about that. It's about taking away things people like and to put that effort elsewhere.

How do you transfer it though? If some businessman has all his wealth tied up in stock in his business, how do you convert that to money? Some other person has to buy the stock. All this does is move the wealth around.

Wealth taxes have been discussed in the modern political stage - but I'm a bit :shrug: about them - I think it'd be fine to continue to only tax capital gains when they're realized - so as long as that businessman can't effectively use any of his wealth he doesn't pay taxes on it - as soon as he benefits from his wealth he pays taxes on the accrued gains.

It doesn't matter. You bleed them through inflation, VAT, whatever. The finance may be abstract, but at the end of the day money is claims for (future) economic output and you can dilute that as needed.

Some ways are better than other, but this idea that the powerful can hide their power through accounting tricks alone is a failure to think at multiple layers of abstraction.

In other words, asset values are entirely conceptual and depend on a raft of parameters.

Unfortunately the people at the top will do everything they can to stop this.

Getting this done may be quite a challenge, but it's a good thing to get done.

It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada (while not perfect) is much better than the US in pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.

UBI is like any other government service: if you're spending more on [Service aimed at me] than I actually need to become a productive member of society (or at least not a drain on it), you're not spending your money right.

You can spend that government money on any number of services: Prisons, Childcare, Libraries, Transportation, etc. UBI is different in one major detail:

UBI assumes that people are, at this stage of human technology and society, smarter about how to spend that money the government is ALREADY going to spend on them than the government itself is.

Furthermore, to differentiate itself from mere "welfare", any attempt at means-testing to try and ensure that only "worthy" clients get UBI is just going to add further cost to the system. Specifically, it will cost more than simply distributing the money involved. After all, drug tests cost money. Paperwork costs money. Employing enforcers costs money AND office space AND equipment for them to do their job.

It's a radical notion -- after all, doesn't figuring out if giving out "free money" actually saves money still itself cost money? Still, we're not comparing UBI to a mythical "perfect system"; we're trying to compare it to the imperfect system we have right now, where the cost of NOT doing it gets reflected in things like crime, mental illness, drug abuse, preventable deaths, etc.

There is already a cost associated to continuing to do things "the way we've always done them". UBI is that same cost spent in a different way.

One of Andrew Yang's proposal was to pay for a UBI with a 10% VAT, especially on services gained from automation, AI etc. Things that give companies a productivity boost, while also avoid taxes. So this would be a way to get the money back.

For example - currently a trucker driver will pay state tax, federal tax, pay taxes on the things they eat/buy. When a self driving truck comes...all of that above won't occur anymore. And the company saves money.

>Things that give companies a productivity boost, while also avoid taxes.

Shovels, cars, tractors, computers, pens, paper etc? A truck driver can do the job of many cart drivers! And a cart driver can do the job of people who carry things with their own body.

Sure, all of those things created large economic gains for their respective economies. It's a question of how much of that economic gain can we capture with taxation.

Give people money, and most of it will get spent. That spending is income for someone, and that income is taxed. I don't understand this argument.

> Give people money, and most of it will get spent. That spending is income for someone, and that income is taxed. I don't understand this argument.

You can't eat money, nor can money cut your hair. refurb's point is that a UBI leads to a decrease in wealth, not in the amount of money in existence.

It will lead to a new equilibrium for sure. Whether that equilibrium is more wealth than currently exists (due to the additional buying power in consumers' hands) or less wealth (due to increasing cost of labor), I don't claim to know. But in the latter case, this decrease in total wealth would be a result of a collective decision that we value our time more than unnecessary material shit. A leaner workforce would have the incentive of higher wages. So in either case (an increase or decrease in total wealth), I'd argue that we're better off for it.

With increasing automation less people can do more work and therefore earn more money, this is already causing some of the unemployment issues we see today.