Long story short, it's a hack article written by some centrist welfarist talking about "political realities" and we need to compromise and blah blah blah UBI bad because targetted programs that help the deserving poor are better.
This was posted on r/basicincome and I responded to it as thus:
There are over 300 million Americans today. Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years.
Yes yes yes, we know it's fricking expensive, anyone wants my ideas on how to pay for it can go to my article on the subject from my blog.
https://outofplatoscave2012.blogspot.com/2023/01/funding-universal-basic-income-in-2023.html
Some UBI proponents respond that policymakers could make the UBI payments taxable. But the savings from doing so would be relatively modest, because the vast bulk of Americans either owe no federal income tax or are in the 10% or 15% tax brackets. For example, if you gave all 328 million Americans a $10,000 UBI and the cost was $3.28 trillion a year (about $33 trillion over ten years) before taxes, then making the UBI payments taxable would reduce that cost only to something like $2.5 trillion or $2.75 trillion (or $25 trillion to $27.5 trillion over ten years).
Making UBI benefits taxable kinda defeats the purpose of UBI. I could see eliminating the standard deduction maybe if you wanted to, but other than that...
We’ll already need substantial new revenues in the coming decades to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and avoid large benefit cuts in them.
you mean just removing the payroll tax cap that artificially kneecaps how much revenue we take in, creating this whole crisis to begin with, right?
We’ll need further tax increases to help repair a crumbling infrastructure that will otherwise impede economic growth.
Sure, but unless you plan on spending trillions a year in infrastructure, I'm not seeing how we can't do it.
And if we want to create more opportunity and reduce racial and other barriers and inequities, we’ll also need to raise new revenues to invest more in areas like pre-school education, child care, college affordability, and revitalizing segregated inner-city communities.
And here we go with the means tested crap.
look, the big difference between me and this guy is ideology. I'm a yang styled human centered capitalist with more of an anti work bend, and this dude is a mainstream liberal who would rather direct money into social programs on top of social programs.
A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs.
Yeah if you're a mainstream lib simping for the status quo.
UBI’s daunting financing challenges raise fundamental questions about its political feasibility, both now and in coming decades. Proponents often speak of an emerging left-right coalition to support it. But consider what UBI’s supporters on the right advocate. They generally propose UBI as a replacement for the current “welfare state.” That is, they would finance UBI by eliminating all or most programs for people with low or modest incomes.
I lean "left" on UBI all things considered, but UBI replacing parts of the existing safety net isn't a bad thing. You can see the above article on funding to see my proposals of what programs to cut, and which ones to keep.
Consider what that would mean. If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them.
If that's your only way to fund UBI, sure, but remember those big tax increases we could and should be doing with it?
Btw, I did some appendices to my UBI article discussing how my proposal would affect various groups of people, you can read it here. And yes, I did address the welfare stuff in it.
https://outofplatoscave2012.blogspot.com/2023/01/how-my-ubi-plan-affects-real-people.html
Yet that’s the platform on which the (limited) support for UBI on the right largely rests. It entails abolishing programs from SNAP (food stamps) — which largely eliminated the severe child malnutrition found in parts of the Southern “black belt” and Appalachia in the late 1960s
You mean the program, which as cited in the above article, only gives people a maximum benefit of $281 a month and comes with work requirements and time limits?
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
Basically a knock off of a knock off of UBI? After all EITC is based on the NIT, which is a sister policy to UBI. It offers $560 a month to an adult, $3733 if you have one child, $6164 for 2 children, and $6935 for three.
Meanwhile my UBI is $15k a year with an additional $5400 a month per child.
Section 8 rental vouchers
Which i wouldnt even cut.
Medicaid
Which I wouldnt even cut and would argue for expanding into medicare for all or a public option program.
These programs lift tens of millions of people, including millions of children, out of poverty each year and make tens of millions more less poor.
Wanna know what also makes people less poor? A FREAKING UBI. And it does it without the paternalism and means testing.
Would we also end Pell Grants that help low-income students afford college?
We could fund free college for something like $60 billion a year last i checked, so i dont see the point in cutting such a program.
Would we terminate support for children in foster care, for mental health services, and for job training?
I really have to ask, is this person interested in a serious answer or are they just interested in moral grandstanding like most liberals seem to be when they talk crap about UBI?
d Dolan, who favors UBI, has calculated that we could finance it by using the proceeds from eliminating all means-tested programs outside health care — including Pell Grants, job training, Head Start, free school lunches, and the like, as well as refundable tax credits, SNAP, SSI, low-income housing programs, etc. The result, Dolan found, would be an annual UBI of $1,582 per person, well below the level of support most low-income families (especially working-poor families with children) now receive. The increase in poverty and hardship would be very large.
Yeah, keep arguing against that strawman, why don't ya?
To further understand the risks, consider how working-age adults who aren’t working would fare. In our political culture, there are formidable political obstacles to providing cash to working-age people who aren’t employed, and it’s unlikely that UBI could surmount them. The nation’s social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance — all go only to people with significant work records. It’s highly unlikely that policymakers would agree to make UBI cash payments of several thousand dollars to people who aren’t elderly or disabled and aren’t working. (By contrast, there is political support for providing poor families that have no earnings with non-cash assistance such as SNAP, Medicaid, rental vouchers, Head Start, and the WIC nutrition program.)
And here we go, this person is only interested in helping the "deserving poor" who "did everything right." They aren't interested in helping all of the poor or giving people freedom.
While cash aid for poor people who aren’t working has fared poorly politically, means-tested programs as a whole have done well. Recent decades have witnessed large expansions of SNAP, Medicaid, the EITC, and other programs.
heres a hint, i dont CARE about the "political feasibility" arguments. Im not trying to make nice with jobists and conservatives. All this dude is closing the overton window flat in our faces.
If anything, means-tested programs have fared somewhat better than universal programs in the last several decades.
And they suck, and it's everything wrong with the existing system.
Since 1980, policymakers in Washington and in a number of states have cut unemployment insurance, contributing to a substantial decline in the share of jobless Americans — now below 30 percent — who receive unemployment benefits. In addition, the 1983 Social Security deal raised the program’s retirement age from 65 to 67, ultimately generating a 14 percent benefit cut for all beneficiaries, regardless of the age at which someone begins drawing benefits. Meanwhile, means-tested benefits overall have substantially expanded despite periodic attacks from the right. The most recent expansion occurred in December of 2015 when policymakers made permanent significant expansions of the EITC and the low-income part of the Child Tax Credit that were due to expire after 2017.
Yeah, because republicans and centrist dems who sing their tune have been in charge. But that whole political era is why i have differing views. This dude is just a standard centrist lib pushing centrist lib arguments about political feasibility. I dont care about political feasibility. I care about changing the debate to make my ideas feasible.
In recent decades, conservatives generally have been more willing to accept expansions of means-tested programs than universal ones, largely due to the substantially lower costs they carry (which means they put less pressure on total government spending and taxes).
And if my life has taught me anything, it's that we shouldnt take our advice from the freaking GOP.
The record of recent decades thus points to an alternative course — pushing for steady incremental gains through available mechanisms, including means-tested programs, to provide as much of a floor as possible for Americans of lesser means.
This person totally supported Hillary in 2016. I can tell. "incremental gains", YOUR INCREMENTAL GAINS ARE ####!
i understand this is an older article, but yeah, whoever wrote it clearly likes the centrist version of the democratic party, and they're just pontificating their garbage.
While some UBI proponents argue that continued pressure on the middle class will make UBI politically feasible, I’m skeptical. Economic pressure on the middle class will not alter UBI’s daunting financing challenges. In fact, more such pressure will likelier increase middle-class resistance to the massive tax increases required to secure UBI without increasing poverty.
...which is why we structure it so 70-80% of people benefit. So we reduce the amount of resistance there is.
And we shouldn’t think that we can just get the resources solely or primarily by hitting people at the top. Will we really tax the top 1 percent or top several percent enough to finance most or all of UBI — on top of the higher taxes we’ll want the same group to pay to shoulder a substantial share of the burden of restoring Social Security solvency, repairing the infrastructure, and meeting other critical needs? Increased pressure on the middle class is more likely to put UBI farther out of reach, unless it’s financed heavily — as UBI supporters on the right favor — by shifting income and resources away from the poor.
Those other programs CAN likely be done with taxes on the rich. Look at what biden wanted to do without raising a penny in taxes below $400k.
But yeah we need higher broad based taxes, something that's more "scandinavian" in nature, and this will require a cultural shift. But I'm here to try to push that shift along, not be like "It CaNt Be DoNe".
To be sure, there is a possible exception: a carbon tax that returns its proceeds to the public via a universal payment. For a carbon tax to have any chance of enactment in the not-too-distant future, however, it almost certainly will have to allocate a substantial part of its proceeds to uses that are necessary to get the votes to enact it in the first place, such as relief for coal-producing states or regions. There’s also a powerful case for using some of the proceeds to greatly expand and accelerate research into alternative energy technologies; a carbon tax likely won’t be sufficient by itself to arrest global warming.
Blah blah blah more arbitrary political conditions.
Btw, my plan above has a carbon tax in it.
I greatly admire the commitment of UBI supporters who see it as a way to end poverty in America. But for UBI to do that, it would have to: (1) be large enough to raise people to the poverty line without ending Medicaid, child care assistance, assistance in meeting high rental costs, and the like (otherwise, out-of-pocket health, child care, and housing costs would push many people back into poverty); and (2) include among its recipients people who aren’t currently working (and lack much of an earnings record), something no U.S. universal program does. It also would have to be financed mainly by raising taxes layered on top of the large tax increases we’ll already need — and will probably have to fight tough political battles to achieve — to avert large benefit cuts in Social Security and Medicare and meet other needs.
It's almost like this guy set this battle up to be unwinnable by design. Most libs do that. More interested in defending their very flawed past victories than actually doing anything right.
This person is a standard hillary/biden supporting craplib through and through, and it shows.
The chances that all this will come to pass — whether now or 10 to 20 years from now, a time when the baby-boomers will nearly all be retired and Social Security and Medicare costs will be much higher, placing greater pressure on the rest of the budget and on taxes — are extremely low. Were we starting from scratch — and were our political culture more like Western Europe’s — UBI might be a real possibility. But that’s not the world we live in.
Again, RAISE THE SOCIAL SECURITY CAP. JESUS!
But yeah, this article is garbage. It's written by a centrist lib obsessed with "political realities" and is intended to set up UBI in a way to fail. Fight a strawman and win. Congrats. slow clap. You beat your strawman.
but yes, we know UBI costs lots and lots of money, and there are ways to pay for it. You might like some better or worse than others. but I have a plan, Yang has a plan, Scott has a plan, we all have plans. It's just a matter of "will we implement them or will we sit around with our thumb up you know where saying "It CaNt Be DoNe!!11!" This is the very archetype of the kind of person who will do the latter.
I just figured this blog would enjoy this political rant of mine.
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