Okay, I can accept that. Let's run some numbers: What are we going to set BI at? There are 228 million adults in the US. If we set BI at a nice round number, say $1,000/month (equivalent to a full-time $6.00/hour job with 2 weeks paid vacation per year), we have to come up with $228 billion dollars per month to fund it. How much of that is a luxury tax going to cover?

If someone can present an actual spreadsheet showing where the money would come from and how to avoid impacting the prices of things that people requiring BI would be purchasing, then I would be extremely interested in it, but I am willing to flat out say that it's impossible to cough up $2.7 trillion yearly (that's 18% of the US's GDP) without moving the needle in a substantial manner.

Out of curiosity, I ran some BI numbers and arrived at a similar figure ($2.9T/yr, 17% of GDP, 81% of the entire federal budget).

I dug into some numbers to try to figure out what kind of tax rate you'd need to make that work. It's... challenging to say the least.

What I did find however was that in terms of income distribution, only 23M households were making <$20K/yr (mean household size was 2). An incredibly rough number, but you could run a Guaranteed Minimum Income program for $20K/yr for about 10x less (1.7% GDP) - you'd get that for free if you switched to single-payer nationalized health care (Canada, Germany, France, UK, Japan costs are 9-11% GDP while the US currently spends just under 18% GDP)[1]

This of course will never happen in the US because it'd make too much sense.

If you want to play w/ some numbers/sources: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgAh7-k-pFfVdG1...

[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS

I would expect that BI would (and should) have an impact on the cost of housing.

If the BI is constant across a geographical area that has varying housing costs then people without any other income would choose to live in cheaper areas, those living in currently expensive areas would have to pay more for basic services to allow people providing them to live nearby. I think this would help to deflate the current housing bubbles.

Social security, Medicare/Medicaid, Pensions/retirement, veterans pensions, etc. That will get you very close to $2T as a starting point.

Most BI advocates also advocate cutting entitlements entirely, that's where they money would come from.

The thing about luxury goods is that they are, well, luxuries. Nobody has to buy them.

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1993-08-16/news/9301300112_...

It depends on how broad your definition of luxury is.

The UK has a sales tax called 'VAT' that applies to almost everything, with a defined list of exceptions.

Most types of food are untaxed, as are books, children's clothes, college education, safety boots, gold investment coins, sport activities, tap water, most healthcare services, burials and cremations, museum entry fees, houseboat moorings, charter of military aeroplanes, and so on [1].

OK so the list of things that are exempt or 0% taxed is fairly long. But the vast majority of things are subject to VAT.

[1] http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/forms-rates/rates/goods-services....