UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (2019)

Re:UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (... by xracy on Monday October 10, 2022 @07:37PM (#33157654)

It's interesting to me, because it doesn't seem that hard or wrong to tax stagnant dollars. And I suspect it would solve a lot of the inflation woes that might happen with UBI, as well as a lot of the US economic woes.

Every time we look at fixing an issue like this, it seems like we're only looking at the half of the problem that involves creating the benefit, because paying for it is unpopular. But wealth accrual in this economy is a net drag. The tax side of trickle-down means that we're only ever working with a trickle to power major public benefits that could otherwise consistently run our economy, and provide robustness where we have a lot of weakness.

You could pay for UBI by heavily taxing stock portfolios of the richest people. + 10% tax on the richest 1% of stock portfolios would raise about 2.3T (source CNBC). It would also take money from people who "can't spend it all" (something Bezos has literally claimed, he has trouble with), and give it to the 300M people who actually have something to spend it on, as evidenced by the huge boom in the economy created by the stimulus package.

It's not that you can't find the money to tax this, it's that no one has the political will to tax anything.

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Re:UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (... by sokoloff on Monday October 10, 2022 @08:25PM (#33158006)

I think the arguments that a federal wealth tax would be unconstitutional are far stronger than the (IMO, fairly tortured logic) arguments that say it would be constitutional.

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Re:UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (... by DougN7 on Monday October 10, 2022 @10:12PM (#33158695)

I’m not sure you can extract $4 trillion over and over, year after year. Maybe once or twice. Maybe.

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Re:UBI Would Likely Increase Poverty Rather Than Reduce It (... by xracy on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @09:32PM (#33269875)

Yeah, cause GDP will definitely just stop growing once you've extracted the $4T. Taxes disappear into a hole you can never get them out of once they've been spent. The stimulus money has famously halted the economy in its tracks.

The point I'm making is that the problem is there's a lot of stagnant dollars providing no value to us, that you could readily reinvest in something like this.

Also, before someone brings up inflation in response, I will point out the reason inflation is rampant, is we're not pulling the money out of the economy at the same rate we're putting it in...

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