Split UBI - Split From Breakdown In Civil Order

[bigfield]

There is an interesting UBI trial in Kenya. Unlike the previous trials which were for a very limited duration, this one is 2 years in to a 12 year trial period. The first set of results are coming out - First Results from World's largest UBI experimentFirst Results from World's largest UBI experiment.)

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week....By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group....As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.......And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

It is too early to generalize and extrapolating the results rural Kenyan villages to more developed regions is problematic, but initially there does not seem to be a negative effect on labor in this sample.

I won't be convinced until we see a trial in American Samoa.

 

[Emily Lake]

But that's what we've got, because the slave owner mentality - people must work or they don't eat, and people won't work unless forced to do so (neither of which seems to apply if you're of the wealthy class; They are only rules for the poor) - is all pervasive amongst the people who have all the money (which they largely got by being decendants of slavers and/or exploiters of cheap labour).

Being cruel isn't a prerequisite for a productive economy, in the post industrial era. It's time we stopped assuming that it is.

That's an unnecessarily rude insinuated comparison, bilby.

Let's take a step back and remember that humans are animals. And animals must put forth effort in order to continue their own survival. Animals must forage or hunt for their food, they must migrate or hibernate to survive the winter. They must compete with other animals, even with others of their own species, often in very bloody ways.

No animal on the planet is entitled to the needs of survival just because it got born. Without expending some effort in order to ensure their own survival, they die.

The only potential exception to this are zoo animals, deprived of their freedom and kept as entertainment for humans to ogle.

What form that effort takes varies from species to species, and among humans it has varied through the ages. We used to have to expend far more effort in hunting and foraging, in order to scrape by an uncertain and precarious existence. As we've evolved more complex social structures, we've become more specialized and no longer need to spend hours out trying to find enough food to not starve and a cave or a tent to protect us from the weather. But it still remains true that we must put forth effort in order to continue our own existence.

 

[Emily Lake]

I find the fixation on the expected overall negative effect of UBI on work effort rather curious. There are plenty of observable examples of people who continue to work even though they have earned millions if not billions of dollars. No one seems to be worried about people reducing the amount of work when they are getting pay raises.

Come on LD, you know better than that. I mean, you literally know better. You understand the marginal value of a dollar, and you understand the ROI involved.

I would love UBI to be a long-term sustainable solution. At the moment, I'm not convinced. I'm not even convinced enough to give it a shot. Here's the deal - if it works, then fantastic. But if it doesn't work... it destroys the entire economy. It destroys the tax base on which it depends, it cannibalizes the entire system.

The entire thing hinges upon the assumption that the vast majority of people in the workforce right now will continue to work the same amount. The requires that only an immaterial number of people choose to stop working or to work materially fewer hours. And that assumption can only occur if the tax burden on workers is small enough to not make a material difference to their time-to-income tradeoff.

The key question is "what portion of people will choose to stop working", and nobody has an answer to that - and furthermore, proponents of UBI are unwilling to even discuss that question with any seriousness. The response is "of course people will keep working, who wouldn't?" That's a hand-waving answer. I know my sister would stop working, as would her boyfriend. So would her children. One of my SIL's kids would definitely stop, the other probably wouldn't because he likes his job and gets a lot of satisfaction from it that is independent of the salary. One of my brothers would keep working, but his wife wouldn't. My other brother would probably work a lot less, but might not stop completely. I'd guess about 90% of the people in my company's customer service department would quit. I'd guess that about 95% of fast food employees, grocery baggers, restaurant servers, and barbacks would quit. Hell, I think the majority of retail employees would quit.

About the only people who would not quit are those of us posting here - and we're almost entirely high income, high education people. And for us... we would only keep working for as long as the tradeoff is worth it. Because I guarantee that when the taxes bring my take-home down low enough, I'm moving to the middle of nowhere and spending my time with a goat and some trees.

That's why I've said multiple times - show me that it's sustainable long term, and I'm in. But I'm not going to risk the entire economy on wishful thinking.

 

[ZiprHead]

Let's take a step back and remember that humans are animals. And animals must put forth effort in order to continue their own survival. Animals must forage or hunt for their food, they must migrate or hibernate to survive the winter. They must compete with other animals, even with others of their own species, often in very bloody ways.

Non-human animals don't create machines that can do work for them so that's a pretty silly metaphor.

 

[Emily Lake]

There is an interesting UBI trial in Kenya. Unlike the previous trials which were for a very limited duration, this one is 2 years in to a 12 year trial period. The first set of results are coming out - First Results from World's largest UBI experimentFirst Results from World's largest UBI experiment.)

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week....By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group....As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.......And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

It is too early to generalize and extrapolating the results rural Kenyan villages to more developed regions is problematic, but initially there does not seem to be a negative effect on labor in this sample.

Promising start.

The risk I see with this is that the funds for the UBI are coming from an external source. They're essentially providing it as charitable donations. With a full-fledged and self-sustaining UBI, that funding is coming from taxes. And those taxes are paid by either spending (thus subject to inflationary pressures) or by income taxes (which reduces the take-home income and is sensitive to trade-off decisions).

I'm quite certain that people getting a lump sum can do great things with it, provided it's a useful amount of money (the couple of thousand back in 2008/2009 or whatever was useless). And I'm sure that people receiving a fixed amount of income have less stress. That's never been the question. The question is whether the funding is sustainable. That's something this study doesn't address at all. None performed so far have done so - the funding to supply the income has always come from an external source.

 

[Emily Lake]

Let's take a step back and remember that humans are animals. And animals must put forth effort in order to continue their own survival. Animals must forage or hunt for their food, they must migrate or hibernate to survive the winter. They must compete with other animals, even with others of their own species, often in very bloody ways.

Non-human animals don't create machines that can do work for them so that's a pretty silly metaphor.

We don't have machines that can do all of our work. But hey, if you want to tax the ever loving hell out of companies that use automation in order to support incomes for the people those machines have replaced, be my guest.

 

[ZiprHead]

Let's take a step back and remember that humans are animals. And animals must put forth effort in order to continue their own survival. Animals must forage or hunt for their food, they must migrate or hibernate to survive the winter. They must compete with other animals, even with others of their own species, often in very bloody ways.

Non-human animals don't create machines that can do work for them so that's a pretty silly metaphor.

We don't have machines that can do all of our work. But hey, if you want to tax the ever loving hell out of companies that use automation in order to support incomes for the people those machines have replaced, be my guest.

Nice bit of straw you've got there.

 

[laughing dog]

I find the fixation on the expected overall negative effect of UBI on work effort rather curious. There are plenty of observable examples of people who continue to work even though they have earned millions if not billions of dollars. No one seems to be worried about people reducing the amount of work when they are getting pay raises.

Come on LD, you know better than that. I mean, you literally know better. You understand the marginal value of a dollar, and you understand the ROI involved.

I would love UBI to be a long-term sustainable solution. At the moment, I'm not convinced. I'm not even convinced enough to give it a shot. Here's the deal - if it works, then fantastic. But if it doesn't work... it destroys the entire economy. It destroys the tax base on which it depends, it cannibalizes the entire system.

I know enough that whether an UBI is sustainable is an empirical question that depends on the UBI structure ( which includes how other income support programs are integrated ), the resulting tax structure and the work choices.

I know projections based on anecdotal evidence are essentially hand- waved assumptions masquerading as analysis.

I know that the only way a UBI destroys an entire economy is if the population allows it to do so.

 

[laughing dog]

There is an interesting UBI trial in Kenya. Unlike the previous trials which were for a very limited duration, this one is 2 years in to a 12 year trial period. The first set of results are coming out - First Results from World's largest UBI experimentFirst Results from World's largest UBI experiment.)

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week....By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group....As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.......And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years ... It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.”

It is too early to generalize and extrapolating the results rural Kenyan villages to more developed regions is problematic, but initially there does not seem to be a negative effect on labor in this sample.

Promising start.

The risk I see with this is that the funds for the UBI are coming from an external source. They're essentially providing it as charitable donations. With a full-fledged and self-sustaining UBI, that funding is coming from taxes. And those taxes are paid by either spending (thus subject to inflationary pressures) or by income taxes (which reduces the take-home income and is sensitive to trade-off decisions).

I'm quite certain that people getting a lump sum can do great things with it, provided it's a useful amount of money (the couple of thousand back in 2008/2009 or whatever was useless). And I'm sure that people receiving a fixed amount of income have less stress. That's never been the question. The question is whether the funding is sustainable. That's something this study doesn't address at all. None performed so far have done so - the funding to supply the income has always come from an external source.

You missed the point that it spurred entrepreneurial activity which generates taxabke income.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No animal on the planet is entitled to the needs of survival just because it got born. Without expending some effort in order to ensure their own survival, they die.

The only potential exception to this are zoo animals, deprived of their freedom and kept as entertainment for humans to ogle.

A lot of farm animals, also.

 

[bilby]

No animal on the planet is entitled to the needs of survival just because it got born. Without expending some effort in order to ensure their own survival, they die.

The only potential exception to this are zoo animals, deprived of their freedom and kept as entertainment for humans to ogle.

A lot of farm animals, also.

And pets.

In fact, domesticated mammals massively outnumber wild mammals, so in a very real sense, most animals on the planet need not expend effort to survive; They're largely provided for by humans.

And a sizable fraction of humans are provided for by other humans too. Children and the elderly certainly are; And it's highly dubious that rentiers and/or heirs "provide for themselves" in terms of working for their livings.

So not only is appealing to the fact that "the animals don't get handouts" as evidence that people also shouldn't, a logical fallacy (the appeal to nature fallacy); It's also not actually true.

All that is being demonstrated here is that the existence of civilisation and advancement, is strongly correlated to having large numbers of both non-human and human animals living without having to strive.

Which is exactly the opposite of the point Emily is apparently seeking to make.

In a very real sense, civilisation IS the ability to tolerate freeloaders, whether those freeloaders are aristocrats, infants, clergymen, landlords, the sick, politicians, the permanently crippled, the elderly, or domesticated livestock.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Work isn't just drudgery to be tolerated. If given enough to meet your basic needs at say, age 45, what would you do, subsist until the end of days? I doubt it. You might tell yourself you can now take your time and find work you enjoy. This might drive up productivity, people working a job they enjoy and all. Further, you would likely say, hey, there's things I still want to do in my life and it's going to take more than this UBI to do it.
I think very few people are just going to lay up and do nothing just because they are being minimally maintained. We're not hamsters in a cage deciding whether we should play in the tube or hit the wheel this morning. I think we will continue to do just what we do now. We might retire a bit earlier. But even in that, my understanding is many retirees struggle to fill their days in retirement and continue to work for social interaction.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No animal on the planet is entitled to the needs of survival just because it got born. Without expending some effort in order to ensure their own survival, they die.

The only potential exception to this are zoo animals, deprived of their freedom and kept as entertainment for humans to ogle.

A lot of farm animals, also.

And pets.

Disagree on dogs. They must comply with the pack leader's wishes. Cats must also behave to some degree, but it's normally natural behavior for them. Caged things have no requirements--but they're basically in a one-household zoo.

In fact, domesticated mammals massively outnumber wild mammals, so in a very real sense, most animals on the planet need not expend effort to survive; They're largely provided for by humans.

"Mammals" is a small subset of "animals."

And a sizable fraction of humans are provided for by other humans too. Children and the elderly certainly are; And it's highly dubious that rentiers and/or heirs "provide for themselves" in terms of working for their livings.

Agreed. Most people must provide for themselves during at least part of their life, though.

In a very real sense, civilisation IS the ability to tolerate freeloaders, whether those freeloaders are aristocrats, infants, clergymen, landlords, the sick, politicians, the permanently crippled, the elderly, or domesticated livestock.

The livestock does not belong on this list. They typically do not need to expend effort (but note that a grazing animal still must find food and water) but neither are they freeloaders.

 

[Harry Bosch]

I don’t know! In my opinion, UPI would be great. Just like Reparations - I’m on board. But I simply prioritize so many other issues more than UPI (and reparations). For example, I’d favor increased spending for our schools, infrastructure, higher ed, environmental problems, and etc.

 

[Swammerdami]

I don’t know! In my opinion, UPI would be great. Just like Reparations - I’m on board. But I simply prioritize so many other issues more than UPI (and reparations). For example, I’d favor increased spending for our schools, infrastructure, higher ed, environmental problems, and etc.

Perhaps we can gather in support of my version of UBI. Instead of just cash, I propose that income transfers from the comfortable to the less-so be in targeted goods and services:

• Free healthcare for all. Freeing employers from a healthcare obligation increases their demand for workers, so is win-win.
• Subsidized child-care, job training, higher education, public transit, food, housing, etc.
• Improved infrastructure, incl. parks and recreation.
• Some of these come with a sort of automatic "means-testing". The rich will want their own schools, their own transit, etc. This reduces the demand for, and hence the cost of these subsidies.

Some of the UBI benefits would be pure cash, but most, while still "universal" in principle, would be targeted as shown.
Libertarians will screech at me to keep gummint's hands off their new-found money: If a couple would prefer to spend this taxpayer largesse on crack cocaine rather than food for their infant, so be it. And the childless who get no benefit from better schools will toss out Marx's "To each according to his needs" and call me a "woke-thinking Jew-loving commie rat inspired by the Khmer Pol Pot." To that I just answer "Calm down, you straw figment lurching and leering inside Swammi's senescent cerebrum!"

- - - - - - - - - - -

Ms. Lake asks if we can afford UBI. There are various ways to address that question arithmetically, but one of the most straightforward is to start with inequality measures like Gini. The following are WorldBank estimates of Gini taken from Wikipedia. I show the U.S., the four highest-Gini countries in Europe, and some other large countries. (I also include Haiti and Laos, as examples of countries with Ginis near that of the U.S.)


Haiti 41.1
Bulgaria 40.5
United States 39.8
Laos 38.8
China 37.1
Montenegro 36.8
Lithuania 36.0
Russia 36.0
Spain 34.9
India 34.2
Japan 32.9
U.K. 32.6
Germany 31.7
South Korea 31.4
France 30.7
Denmark 27.5
Netherlands 26.0

What this list shows is that there is plenty of room for income redistribution without entrepreneurs fleeing for Bulgaria or Haiti in droves. Do UBI's detractors think South Korea, Denmark and Holland are failed socialist states?

Google is increasingly reluctant to provide me with simple stats I ask for (though happy to point me to paywalls). But I do find crude estimates of wealth distribution. (I'd use income rather than wealth for this comparison, but make do with what Google presents.)

I do NOT propose the following redistribution. Just use it as arithmetic demonstration that the wealth or income gap CAN be reduced without tragic results.

Google shows me that the top 10% of U.S.'s 130 million households have, on average, almost $4 million in wealth. On a "share of the pie" basis this is about double of 50 years ago, I think. We could take away half of that $4 million and the rich would still be as well off, relatively, as during the Boom of the 1960's. If we taxed away a teeny-tiny 2% of that Top-10% wealth and gave it to the lowest 6% (i.e. households in "poverty"), that works out to $133,000 per impoverished household. (I am NOT suggesting we give out that cash along with free transport to the street-corners where crack is sold. I'm just demonstrating that there is huge room for redistribution measures.)

 

[bigfield]

Perhaps we can gather in support of my version of UBI. Instead of just cash, I propose that income transfers from the comfortable to the less-so be in targeted goods and services:

• Free healthcare for all. Freeing employers from a healthcare obligation increases their demand for workers, so is win-win.
• Subsidized child-care, job training, higher education, public transit, food, housing, etc.
• Improved infrastructure, incl. parks and recreation.
• Some of these come with a sort of automatic "means-testing". The rich will want their own schools, their own transit, etc. This reduces the demand for, and hence the cost of these subsidies.

Some of the UBI benefits would be pure cash, but most, while still "universal" in principle, would be targeted as shown.

UBI is pure cash by definition, not services, subsidies and works.

I'm in favour of everything you've proposed but those measures are necessary in addition to UBI, not as an alternative.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, you need to have things like universal healthcare as a fundamental requirement to be considered a civilised society at all. It's not an alternative to a UBI, it's a necessary adjunct to one.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Perhaps we can gather in support of my version of UBI. Instead of just cash, I propose that income transfers from the comfortable to the less-so be in targeted goods and services:

• Free healthcare for all. Freeing employers from a healthcare obligation increases their demand for workers, so is win-win.
• Subsidized child-care, job training, higher education, public transit, food, housing, etc.
• Improved infrastructure, incl. parks and recreation.
• Some of these come with a sort of automatic "means-testing". The rich will want their own schools, their own transit, etc. This reduces the demand for, and hence the cost of these subsidies.

Some of the UBI benefits would be pure cash, but most, while still "universal" in principle, would be targeted as shown.

UBI is pure cash by definition, not services, subsidies and works.

I'm in favour of everything you've proposed but those measures are necessary in addition to UBI, not as an alternative.

Yea UBI is a great idea. But probably one of the lowest requests that I’d prioritize.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don’t know! In my opinion, UPI would be great. Just like Reparations - I’m on board. But I simply prioritize so many other issues more than UPI (and reparations). For example, I’d favor increased spending for our schools, infrastructure, higher ed, environmental problems, and etc.

Perhaps we can gather in support of my version of UBI. Instead of just cash, I propose that income transfers from the comfortable to the less-so be in targeted goods and services:

• Free healthcare for all. Freeing employers from a healthcare obligation increases their demand for workers, so is win-win.
• Subsidized child-care, job training, higher education, public transit, food, housing, etc.
• Improved infrastructure, incl. parks and recreation.
• Some of these come with a sort of automatic "means-testing". The rich will want their own schools, their own transit, etc. This reduces the demand for, and hence the cost of these subsidies.

I like the idea of making it in the form of benefits. No means testing, though--means testing makes sense if you want to provide something only to the poor. However, providing it to all but the rich generally ends up with a lot of effort spent on whether they qualify which produces no value.

I just have a big problem with what the quality level will be. Medicare is already substantially inferior to good health plans and the disparity grows wider over time.

Some of the UBI benefits would be pure cash, but most, while still "universal" in principle, would be targeted as shown.
Libertarians will screech at me to keep gummint's hands off their new-found money: If a couple would prefer to spend this taxpayer largesse on crack cocaine rather than food for their infant, so be it. And the childless who get no benefit from better schools will toss out Marx's "To each according to his needs" and call me a "woke-thinking Jew-loving commie rat inspired by the Khmer Pol Pot." To that I just answer "Calm down, you straw figment lurching and leering inside Swammi's senescent cerebrum!"

We already see far too much of money going to the parent's wants before the child's needs.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Ms. Lake asks if we can afford UBI. There are various ways to address that question arithmetically, but one of the most straightforward is to start with inequality measures like Gini. The following are WorldBank estimates of Gini taken from Wikipedia. I show the U.S., the four highest-Gini countries in Europe, and some other large countries. (I also include Haiti and Laos, as examples of countries with Ginis near that of the U.S.)

I don't see how this is even relevant.

What this list shows is that there is plenty of room for income redistribution without entrepreneurs fleeing for Bulgaria or Haiti in droves. Do UBI's detractors think South Korea, Denmark and Holland are failed socialist states?

It provides no indication of what you say.

And note that the standard of living in much of Europe is well below US averages. There's a price to be paid for their generous benefit systems.

Google is increasingly reluctant to provide me with simple stats I ask for (though happy to point me to paywalls). But I do find crude estimates of wealth distribution. (I'd use income rather than wealth for this comparison, but make do with what Google presents.)

I do NOT propose the following redistribution. Just use it as arithmetic demonstration that the wealth or income gap CAN be reduced without tragic results.

Google shows me that the top 10% of U.S.'s 130 million households have, on average, almost $4 million in wealth. On a "share of the pie" basis this is about double of 50 years ago, I think. We could take away half of that $4 million and the rich would still be as well off, relatively, as during the Boom of the 1960's. If we taxed away a teeny-tiny 2% of that Top-10% wealth and gave it to the lowest 6% (i.e. households in "poverty"), that works out to $133,000 per impoverished household. (I am NOT suggesting we give out that cash along with free transport to the street-corners where crack is sold. I'm just demonstrating that there is huge room for redistribution measures.)

1) By looking at wealth rather than income you neglect the fact that you're consuming wealth. Taking that "2%" basically halves the income of retirees even if you're taking it from pre-tax money. Take it from post-tax money and it's far worse.

2) There's a lot of "money" that can't actually be spent. The economy doesn't produce the goods/services to spend it on, converting it to consumer spending is going to cause an inflation spike.

3) You probably didn't do much for those households in poverty anyway--most people in poverty are there because of economic mismanagement and the money won't fix that.

 

[Swammerdami]

I don’t know! In my opinion, UPI would be great. Just like Reparations - I’m on board. But I simply prioritize so many other issues more than UPI (and reparations). For example, I’d favor increased spending for our schools, infrastructure, higher ed, environmental problems, and etc.

Perhaps we can gather in support of my version of UBI. Instead of just cash, I propose that income transfers from the comfortable to the less-so be in targeted goods and services:

• Free healthcare for all. Freeing employers from a healthcare obligation increases their demand for workers, so is win-win.
• Subsidized child-care, job training, higher education, public transit, food, housing, etc.
• Improved infrastructure, incl. parks and recreation.
• Some of these come with a sort of automatic "means-testing". The rich will want their own schools, their own transit, etc. This reduces the demand for, and hence the cost of these subsidies.

It sounds like you and I are largely in agreement. However you managed to misconstrue almost every point I made!

I like the idea of making it in the form of benefits. No means testing, though--means testing makes sense if you want to provide something only to the poor.

Yes, and my proposal did NOT involve means testing. It seems you misconstrued my "automatic 'means testing'". The point is that subsidized child care, while available free to the rich, is of no interest to parents who can afford their own babysitters. And so on, down the list of all the free or subsidized services I mentioned.

However, providing it to all but the rich generally ends up with a lot of effort spent on whether they qualify which produces no value.

NO. I am AVOIDING means testing. You misunderstood.

I just have a big problem with what the quality level will be. Medicare is already substantially inferior to good health plans and the disparity grows wider over time.

You get what you pay for. Medicare was NOT designed by legislators who wanted a good health program. It was designed by Joe Lieberman, or whoever the 60th-best Senator was needed to stop a filibuster.

VA Medicine has a bad reputation propagated by right-wing media (whose goal coincides with Ronald Reagan's dictum to make Americans hate government). Actual users of VA Medical brag about how good it is.

But this is all just pipe-dream anyway. As long as QOPAnon retains power -- even 41 Senators plus Joe Manchin -- many efforts would be doomed to failure.

Some of the UBI benefits would be pure cash, but most, while still "universal" in principle, would be targeted as shown.
Libertarians will screech at me to keep gummint's hands off their new-found money: If a couple would prefer to spend this taxpayer largesse on crack cocaine rather than food for their infant, so be it. And the childless who get no benefit from better schools will toss out Marx's "To each according to his needs" and call me a "woke-thinking Jew-loving commie rat inspired by the Khmer Pol Pot." To that I just answer "Calm down, you straw figment lurching and leering inside Swammi's senescent cerebrum!"

We already see far too much of money going to the parent's wants before the child's needs.

So we agree on that!

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Ms. Lake asks if we can afford UBI. There are various ways to address that question arithmetically, but one of the most straightforward is to start with inequality measures like Gini. The following are WorldBank estimates of Gini taken from Wikipedia. I show the U.S., the four highest-Gini countries in Europe, and some other large countries. (I also include Haiti and Laos, as examples of countries with Ginis near that of the U.S.)

I don't see how this is even relevant.

VERY relevant. The whole idea of income transfers -- taxing (primarily from the high-income people) to provide universal benefit (primarily benefiting low-income people) depends on -- wait for it! -- the high-income people having much higher income than the low-income people! I don't know if I can explain the arithmetic plainer than that.

When asking whether a society can "afford" an income-redistribution program, the quantitative disparity between high- and low-income people is KEY.

The U.S. has higher disparity than Europe. (In part this is because European countries already have programs similar to what I propose: programs which have reduced Gini.)

And it is VERY relevant to see countries like Denmark and Holland with low disparity: These are not socialist shit-hole countries. (I will admit that the richest 1% in Denmark may not be bathing their infants in caviar as some of America's super-rich do, if that's your point.)

And Bulgaria, Laos and Haiti are not exactly capitalist paradises.

Can you explain why you feel these comparisons are irrelevant?

What this list shows is that there is plenty of room for income redistribution without entrepreneurs fleeing for Bulgaria or Haiti in droves. Do UBI's detractors think South Korea, Denmark and Holland are failed socialist states?

It provides no indication of what you say.

Wrong.

And note that the standard of living in much of Europe is well below US averages. There's a price to be paid for their generous benefit systems.

UBI is intended to improve the standard of living of the poor. I've no idea what statistic you're referencing but it ain't the standard of living of the poor.

Google is increasingly reluctant to provide me with simple stats I ask for (though happy to point me to paywalls). But I do find crude estimates of wealth distribution. (I'd use income rather than wealth for this comparison, but make do with what Google presents.)

I do NOT propose the following redistribution. Just use it as arithmetic demonstration that the wealth or income gap CAN be reduced without tragic results.

Google shows me that the top 10% of U.S.'s 130 million households have, on average, almost $4 million in wealth. On a "share of the pie" basis this is about double of 50 years ago, I think. We could take away half of that $4 million and the rich would still be as well off, relatively, as during the Boom of the 1960's. If we taxed away a teeny-tiny 2% of that Top-10% wealth and gave it to the lowest 6% (i.e. households in "poverty"), that works out to $133,000 per impoverished household. (I am NOT suggesting we give out that cash along with free transport to the street-corners where crack is sold. I'm just demonstrating that there is huge room for redistribution measures.)

1) By looking at wealth rather than income you neglect the fact that you're consuming wealth.

Did I need a larger font here?:

(I'd use income rather than wealth for this comparison, but make do with what Google presents.)

I've looked up a lot of this before, downloaded tables and what-not. I've so many bookmarks I need bookmarks to them. But I still use Google mainly, and searches don't work well for me now, what with paywalls etc.

If YOU posted a link to tables of U.S. income distribution, then Sorry, I missed them.

Be careful with overly-simplistic tables, however. So much of America's income goes to the top 0.01% (or even top 0.001%) that it's easy to be misled about the extent of inequality.

Taking that "2%" basically halves the income of retirees even if you're taking it from pre-tax money. Take it from post-tax money and it's far worse.

In the "thought experiment" the 2% confiscation was a one-time event. I was certainly NOT proposing a $133,000 annual payment to every poor family.

And again, it was just a back-of-the-envelope example to get a feel for the numbers involved. Emily Lake's claim that such a transfer is unfeasible arithmetically is simply wrong.

2) There's a lot of "money" that can't actually be spent. The economy doesn't produce the goods/services to spend it on, converting it to consumer spending is going to cause an inflation spike.

Take your ill-founded hypothesis to the Inflation thread!

3) You probably didn't do much for those households in poverty anyway--most people in poverty are there because of economic mismanagement and the money won't fix that.

Hunh? My plan offered subsidized housing and food, etc. and specifically NOT "money."