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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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The conclusion is basically of course a UBI works - you give most people extra money, they'll spend it on things they need and things that are worthwhile rather than blowing it all on vices.
It's something we see time and time again, and anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is either rich or blind.
I’ve always felt that the push back comes from people who assume others are at the same level of means as they are. A lot of people don’t understand food insecurity, or that “you have a car” doesn’t mean the oil was changed this year.
Or antisocial in the psychological sense, ie "I see it, and I'm not rich, but people suffering under me makes me feel superior, gives me the dopamine rush of schadenfreude, and I'll just go ahead and make shit up in my head about why I believe they deserve their suffering so I can just revel in how much better I'm doing guilt free."
As an American, its a tragic reality that 10s of millions of us are proud sadists. Not entirely our fault, our owners gained their fortunes by not caring about how their profiteering hurt others, ane they propagandize us to worship and deify them and their mindset of If I hurt you to benefit myself, its just business.
The thing that keeps it from working is the cost. None of these experiments test the U in UBI.
Giving even a measly $10k in UBI to every US (for example) citizen of working age would cost over $2 trillion annually.
The sum of all welfare spending last year was $1 trillion. So, the common argument that cutting other programs to replace it with UBI holds no water--cutting all of it only gets you halfway to a paltry sum that's far below the poverty line, and the whole reason we're talking about UBI to begin with is because people don't feel that those programs do enough to help the impoverished.
What about military spending? The sum of all defense spending last year was $800 billion. Cutting 100% of it (which would be objectively stupid for reasons I hope wouldn't need explaining) won't get you there either.
What about taking the billionaires' wealth? The total estimated net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even if you could wave a magic wand and convert all of this "net worth" 1:1 into cash, that still funds this shitty tiny hypothetical $10k UBI for less than 3 years.
We are simply not in a state where true UBI is even close to financially viable.
so, basically, according to your example, we could take yearly welfare spending, assuming it's 1 trillion. Every year, delete an entire section of bureacratic bullshit, and then everyone would get 5 grand annually.
Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Now to be fair, that is all of welfare, so not exactly ideal, but still. It's a pretty manageable concept in that regard.
If you remove every welfare program that exists, sure. But that's not good--remember that UBI goes to everyone, while welfare program dollars go based on need. So it stands to reason that the average person who gets some sort(s) of welfare now, will end up able to buy less care with that $5000 annually, than they're getting now.