UBI makes 0 sense if one can calculate properly. Almost no nation can be able fund it with current debts they have. It brings cost of Trillions to budget, not possible with more crazy rich tax. It would make rich move. Exc. Norway, Qatar, UAE and maybe few small others. Only possible in these ones because their wealth funds are by far biggest in the world per citizen already.

A fiscally balanced UBI is simply one where the average taxpayer receives the same amount of UBI as they pay in extra taxes.

In the US the average taxpayer makes $40K, and currently pays $6K in taxes, for a net of $34K.

If we add a $1K/month UBI, then under a balanced plan that taxpayer would make $52K and pay $18K in taxes for a net of $34K. That's a tax rate of 35% and is obviously feasible since there are lots of people & places with much higher rates.

Similar calculations show that a UBI of $3K per month is not feasible.

$1K/month won't cover rent in most of the US but it might be possible to live on it if you live in shared housing and eat nothing but rice & beans.

I don’t understand this. If everyone is getting taxed to the point where they only make $34k, this UBI solution would make everyone poor with no way to work harder, or learn more, to get ahead. This is how black markets to get paid under the table start to form.

And if all the UBI is coming from the tax someone pays in, just lower taxes. It would have the same impact without all the extra overhead.

> . If everyone is getting taxed to the point where they only make $34k

Only the average taxpayer gets taxed that amount. It roughly means a 16% tax increase. Somebody making $1M a year would pay $160K extra and get $12K in UBI.

How is everyone not worse off under this plan? They are being bled dry by taxes and tossed a couple nickels back as UBI. No one would vote for this.

The only people who wouldn’t be worse off are people with no income to start with. I assume they’d get some base level $1k UBI.

I think Andrew Yang had the right idea, in the limited amount I heard. Tax the cooperations that are using AI or automation to reduce the need for workers. Their costs are going down, while their profits stay high, so capture that and give it to the people who were displaced. Bleeding the middle class, and people in general, doesn’t make sense.

The term UBI then doesn't mean a guaranteed income, sufficient to live on.

That's exactly what the proponents saying it would let people create art and other projects that they don't have time to do today argue for.

The "B" in UBI demands that the income be sufficient for basic needs and other social welfare systems observably do not provide that unconditionally.

The "B" means that UBI is a welfare system where everyone in the relevant population group receives the same basic income (at least in some technical sense), regardless of their other income. The "U" means that "everyone" gets it. People sometimes distinguish between full and partial basic income, depending on whether the basic income is sufficient to cover most people's basic needs.

Does that really make sense to you?

You’ve identified the connection between basic income and basic needs; and even identified that there’s full basic income and partial basic income; but you think that the “basic” in universal basic income is just a redundant qualifier of the “universal” bit?

The B in universal basic income means everyone gets a basic income to cover their basic needs. Obviously.

Of course it does. There have been many basic income proposals over the decades, some of them universal and some not. It does not make sense to assume that UBI refers to any specific model.

In particular, there are some UBI proposals where the level of the basic income is intentionally too low to cover basic needs. Those proposals aim to dismantle the welfare traps that plague non-basic income models. Once your income grows high enough that you start losing welfare benefits, your effective marginal tax rate can be very high. Rates above 80% are common, and sometimes they rise above 100%.

Using your logic then, what’s the difference between a universal income and a universal basic income? There doesn’t seem to be any.

You seem to have confused yourself into thinking that since you could run a “universal partial basic income” scheme that the definition of the term UBI must refer to a general framework that can accommodate this. But that is semantically backwards.

UBI is universal full basic income. Partial UBI is a different thing.

It’s like saying you can do a 360 flip and then doing a “partial 360” where you turn 180 degrees.

“Full basic” means it meets your basic needs. It means basic. Binary.

“Partial Universal Basic Income” equates to “Universal Not Basic Income”.

The "basic" part is an accounting technicality. Everyone entitled to the benefit gets the basic income, but it's taxed away from those who earn enough. This is in contrast to traditional welfare benefits, which you only get if you apply for them.

There are also basic income proposals without the "universal" part. For example, only those who work get the basic income. (This is often called negative income tax.) This is supposed to give those in necessary but low-paying jobs a fairer share of wealth than what the market would give.

I've never heard of anything called "universal income".

There's no "demand". Basic means setting a base income level. That's it. It's disingenuous to assert that you can't have UBI below some threshold.

You could set UBI at $50 per month ($300 per year). By itself, this isn't enough to survive on in a developed country, and the amount would be negligible for almost everybody. But if you're in a situation where $50 per month is going to make a material impact to your life, then you really need it. UBI disproportionately helps the most desperate. That's the point.

All gov welfare leads to the conclusion of the GP.

So, it's just a question of Congress passing the right rules and not messing it up? That's not very reassuring...