Split UBI - Split From Breakdown In Civil Order

[Elixir]

...at least some families will decide that it's more advantageous for one parent to stop working and stay home with the kids, and that would impact the taxable base in future years.

Yes, in future years those kids will be less likely on average to need a public defender, or food, shelter and clothing in the form of a jail sentence, and will be more likely to qualify and to hold a productive job. That will lower the need for more taxes while simultaneously providing more tax income to the government.

The "conservative" version of long term views seems awfully short-sighted to me.

 

[Emily Lake]

China is becoming increasingly problematic

You really could just stop there

 

[laughing dog]

The USA has about 1/3 of billion people. The current poverty level is less than$15k for s single person . Making 15k the UBI yields $5 trillion in transfers. Current US GDP snd Personal income is about $24 trillion. So $ 5 trillion is arithmetically available.

Of course, there are various current transfer programs (disability, part of social security, food stamps, etc…) that would no longer be needed. And depending on the household size and earned income, some UBI would be taxed. A conservative estimate of those savings is at least 1/2 trillion. Yielding a net revenue need of 4.5 trillion. It is certainly in the realm of non-destructive taxation to this observer.

Of course, it would require major legislative overalls of many programs and the tax code.

Thanks for a starting point

With respect to your premise...

• Why would you tax UBI? That seems like double-dipping, and kind of defeats the purpose. Or is this just short-hand language, and you actually mean that for some people, the UBI would push their income above the 0% bracket, so that previously untaxed incomes would now be taxed?
• Why choose FPL? FPL doesn't provide a livable income except perhaps in a very few places in the US.
• Are you assuming that the workforce will remain unchanged in future years? Are you assuming that nobody will choose to no longer work? At a minimum, I would think that at least some families will decide that it's more advantageous for one parent to stop working and stay home with the kids, and that would impact the taxable base in future years.

My biggest problem with your example is that the math only works because you're using the ENTIRE GDP as your base. Your estimate using FPL, with offsets for sunset welfare programs, results in a need for $4.5 trillion. In 2022, the entire government revenue was just a bit over $5 trillion. To make your premise work, your basically assuming an increase to the tax rate of 25% across the board from it's present levels, for all taxes of every type.

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

 

[Emily Lake]

Doesn't the IRS still pick up the tab for the subsidies?

Not the IRS. The initial premium subsidies were funded via specific ACA fees applied to all health care coverage, including employer sponsored coverage. The expansion put in place during covid (and extended through the end of 2025) is unfunded, meaning it comes from overall federal budget and magic.

But that's not what I was talking about. When ACA first came out, there were five elements that involved financial transfers: Risk Corridors, Reinsurance, Risk Adjustment (the 3Rs), Cost Share Reduction reimbursements, and Premium Subsidies. Risk Corridors and Reinsurance were short-term transitional items to help offset the variability expected in the early years of ACA, and are now expired.

The one I was talking about is the Cost Share Reduction (CSR) reimbursements. On Silver plans, insurers are required to offer plans that have lower point of service costs (deductibles, coinsurance, copays) to members with very low incomes. It recognizes that premium isn't the only barrier for lower income people, and helps ensure they have access to care in a reasonable way. That makes those plans a lot more generous, but insurers charge the same premium. So the list premium for a plan with a $5000 deductible and the list premium for a plan with a $500 deductible ends up being the same... But the insurer is paying about 94% of the incurred costs for the latter plan, and only 60% of the incurred costs for the former. As ACA was initially passed, the government was supposed to pay the insurer that 34% gap. But they don't seem to know how to budget for that, and didn't engage any actuaries in their planning... so they just said "Oh no, that's too expensive, we're just not going to pay you - you insurers should just increase your prices on ALL your plans to cover it".

 

[Emily Lake]

Transition to free medical care would be difficult. The ACA system caters to insurance companies.

ACA doesn't cater to insurance companies. It caters to partisans in congress who wanted to get some goodwill from their consituents by passing a bill that sounded good on the surface but didn't address any of the actual problems in our system.

Instead of recognizing that health insurance makes no sense if the government is paying for everything, ACA was designed to further enrich insurance companies.

It doesn't do that. Insurance companies are absolutely not getting rich off of ACA. Additionally, just eliminating health insurance doesn't fix much at all. On average, health insurers make a profit margin of between 4% and 5%. Anything above about 6% is very rare, and a whole lot of companies have margins in the 2.5% range. Even for-profit health insurers, who run at the top end of the margin range, aren't making bank.

Doctors, specialists in particular, are a different issue. As are pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers, and medical supply companies. Those all run between 30% and 60% profit margins. Specialist doctors tend to make upwards of $200K per year, and even generalists run at $150K and above. For-profit hospitals tend to run at higher margins, but there's a lot of variability involved from year to year. At the end of the day, a huge amount of the health cost problems in the US are due to extremely high cost of services on the provider side, paired with over-utilization of a lot of services.

 

[Emily Lake]

The USA has about 1/3 of billion people. The current poverty level is less than$15k for s single person . Making 15k the UBI yields $5 trillion in transfers. Current US GDP snd Personal income is about $24 trillion. So $ 5 trillion is arithmetically available.

Of course, there are various current transfer programs (disability, part of social security, food stamps, etc…) that would no longer be needed. And depending on the household size and earned income, some UBI would be taxed. A conservative estimate of those savings is at least 1/2 trillion. Yielding a net revenue need of 4.5 trillion. It is certainly in the realm of non-destructive taxation to this observer.

Of course, it would require major legislative overalls of many programs and the tax code.

Thanks for a starting point

With respect to your premise...

• Why would you tax UBI? That seems like double-dipping, and kind of defeats the purpose. Or is this just short-hand language, and you actually mean that for some people, the UBI would push their income above the 0% bracket, so that previously untaxed incomes would now be taxed?
• Why choose FPL? FPL doesn't provide a livable income except perhaps in a very few places in the US.
• Are you assuming that the workforce will remain unchanged in future years? Are you assuming that nobody will choose to no longer work? At a minimum, I would think that at least some families will decide that it's more advantageous for one parent to stop working and stay home with the kids, and that would impact the taxable base in future years.

My biggest problem with your example is that the math only works because you're using the ENTIRE GDP as your base. Your estimate using FPL, with offsets for sunset welfare programs, results in a need for $4.5 trillion. In 2022, the entire government revenue was just a bit over $5 trillion. To make your premise work, your basically assuming an increase to the tax rate of 25% across the board from it's present levels, for all taxes of every type.

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

How did $5 Trillion turn into half a Trillion?

I'm not sure what constitutes "unrealistic" in your book... but essentially doubling the entire US government revenue in order to support UBI seems like it might be a bit unpalatable to a whole lot of people and businesses.

 

[laughing dog]

The USA has about 1/3 of billion people. The current poverty level is less than$15k for s single person . Making 15k the UBI yields $5 trillion in transfers. Current US GDP snd Personal income is about $24 trillion. So $ 5 trillion is arithmetically available.

Of course, there are various current transfer programs (disability, part of social security, food stamps, etc…) that would no longer be needed. And depending on the household size and earned income, some UBI would be taxed. A conservative estimate of those savings is at least 1/2 trillion. Yielding a net revenue need of 4.5 trillion. It is certainly in the realm of non-destructive taxation to this observer.

Of course, it would require major legislative overalls of many programs and the tax code.

Thanks for a starting point

With respect to your premise...

• Why would you tax UBI? That seems like double-dipping, and kind of defeats the purpose. Or is this just short-hand language, and you actually mean that for some people, the UBI would push their income above the 0% bracket, so that previously untaxed incomes would now be taxed?
• Why choose FPL? FPL doesn't provide a livable income except perhaps in a very few places in the US.
• Are you assuming that the workforce will remain unchanged in future years? Are you assuming that nobody will choose to no longer work? At a minimum, I would think that at least some families will decide that it's more advantageous for one parent to stop working and stay home with the kids, and that would impact the taxable base in future years.

My biggest problem with your example is that the math only works because you're using the ENTIRE GDP as your base. Your estimate using FPL, with offsets for sunset welfare programs, results in a need for $4.5 trillion. In 2022, the entire government revenue was just a bit over $5 trillion. To make your premise work, your basically assuming an increase to the tax rate of 25% across the board from it's present levels, for all taxes of every type.

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

How did $5 Trillion turn into half a Trillion?

I'm not sure what constitutes "unrealistic" in your book... but essentially doubling the entire US government revenue in order to support UBI seems like it might be a bit unpalatable to a whole lot of people and businesses.

The 0.5 trillion was my conservative estimate of existing transfer payments that would no longer be needed. Doubling revenue is only necessary if there are no reductions elsewhere.

My point is that the numbers make an UBI seem sustainable. Whether it is attainable or palatable are different issues.

 

[Toni]

Are you telling me that you plan to tax the UBI that is being paid to citizens via taxes?

No, I'm telling you that income above the UBI is, by definition, disposable luxury income, and that nobody will be driven to penury by its being taxed heavily.

If the UBI is sufficient that any income more than that is disposable and can be taxed at exorbitant rates... your schema is going to collapse even faster.

There would be no good reason for anyone to toil away for extremely low pay, when they can have enough to live comfortably by doing nothing more than being born.

Different people have different ideas of what is ‘comfortable,’ much less desirable. I look at family members and acquaintances who are not so fortunate as I have been and who struggle to cover housing and basic necessities despite working full time their entire adulthood. They do not think they will ever be able to retire and at least some of them have serious health problems.

There are also those who struggle with serious mental health issues, addiction and/or the effects of substance abuse, physical disabilities, and other conditions that make it difficult or impossible to find employment sufficient to keep them housed and fed. Some of those disabilities come from their employment—take a good look at 60+ year olds who are/were farmers, carpenters, commercial fishermen, plumbers, electricians, construction workers. Chances are their bodies won’t let them continue in their jobs and chances are, they won’t have enough saved to supplement their SS.

I used to be opposed to UBI but I struggle now with how much I owe —and how much I can afford to help siblings who have worked their entire lives —and struggle to make ends meet, while living very modestly.

 

[Emily Lake]

The USA has about 1/3 of billion people. The current poverty level is less than$15k for s single person . Making 15k the UBI yields $5 trillion in transfers. Current US GDP snd Personal income is about $24 trillion. So $ 5 trillion is arithmetically available.

Of course, there are various current transfer programs (disability, part of social security, food stamps, etc…) that would no longer be needed. And depending on the household size and earned income, some UBI would be taxed. A conservative estimate of those savings is at least 1/2 trillion. Yielding a net revenue need of 4.5 trillion. It is certainly in the realm of non-destructive taxation to this observer.

Of course, it would require major legislative overalls of many programs and the tax code.

Thanks for a starting point

With respect to your premise...

• Why would you tax UBI? That seems like double-dipping, and kind of defeats the purpose. Or is this just short-hand language, and you actually mean that for some people, the UBI would push their income above the 0% bracket, so that previously untaxed incomes would now be taxed?
• Why choose FPL? FPL doesn't provide a livable income except perhaps in a very few places in the US.
• Are you assuming that the workforce will remain unchanged in future years? Are you assuming that nobody will choose to no longer work? At a minimum, I would think that at least some families will decide that it's more advantageous for one parent to stop working and stay home with the kids, and that would impact the taxable base in future years.

My biggest problem with your example is that the math only works because you're using the ENTIRE GDP as your base. Your estimate using FPL, with offsets for sunset welfare programs, results in a need for $4.5 trillion. In 2022, the entire government revenue was just a bit over $5 trillion. To make your premise work, your basically assuming an increase to the tax rate of 25% across the board from it's present levels, for all taxes of every type.

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

How did $5 Trillion turn into half a Trillion?

I'm not sure what constitutes "unrealistic" in your book... but essentially doubling the entire US government revenue in order to support UBI seems like it might be a bit unpalatable to a whole lot of people and businesses.

The 0.5 trillion was my conservative estimate of existing transfer payments that would no longer be needed. Doubling revenue is only necessary if there are no reductions elsewhere.

Gotcha.

My point is that the numbers make an UBI seem sustainable. Whether it is attainable or palatable are different issues.

Okay. I suppose if you just continually tax the taxes it can be considered sustainable. I would still say it's unreasonable and wouldn't be acceptable... so I guess when you get a beneficent dictatorship in place, you can give it a go!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And $1.51T of that was Social Security--you going to take people's retirement away???

And replace it with a different source of income?

Except you are not. My numbers were assuming poverty line UBI--less than half what my wife gets.

Fuck yes.

The fundamental idea of a UBI is that everyone gets it, and no one gets ANY other money from government. It replaces ALL other direct payments of cash to citizens.

And gets you lynched by all those seniors you just threw into poverty.

When you can prove that it doesn't work if:

A) You don't scrap all the other cash payments to citizens; and/or

B) You don't impose sufficient taxes to avoid it causing runaway inflation

... you haven't proven it doesn't work. You've proven that something similar, but designed to fail, doesn't work.

Well, duh.

I note you didn't address the rest of my numbers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

so much of bad "luck" comes down to not planning ahead.

So much of not planning ahead comes down to the immediate urgency of food, shelter and clothing.

No. So much of it is not living below your means.

Rather, reality is a trap--to climb out requires long term thinking.

Okay so the more fortunate of us (whose good fortune may or may not be an outcome of good planning) can sit by and be passively complicit in, and supportive of the trapping process because it’s a feature of “reality”.
Got it.

No. I'm not saying to just give up. Rather, recognize that it's reality that's the trap and design a system to help people out of the trap. If you focus on the wrong thing (believing it's the system causing it) you'll most likely never find a solution.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How about this - how about you elaborate on why you think machines is somehow an answer to all of our needs, so that humans don't ever have to expend any effort at all... and then perhaps we can have something to talk about.

It's not possible now. Someday it probably will be possible. It's not an unreasonable hypothetical, but it is not a current solution.

Meh. I don't think it's possible. You can believe whatever you want to believe.

At a minimum... someone is going to have to be able to design the machines and design the software for the machines. If everyone is dependent on machines for our entire survival, then the people who design the machines are going to have to expend effort for both their own survival as well as being held accountable for the survival of the entire species.

I suppose if you design machines that can design machines, and then turn everything over to those machines and just happily accept being a pet for the rest of our existence, it's "possible".

There will come a point where the average person simply can't make a useful contribution to the system. All the basic work will be done by machines, there will be innovators who improve things (and enjoy a higher standard of living as a result.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

Is this just an exercise in throwing numbers around with no concern for reality???

What's the point in giving it and turning around and taxing it away?

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

But there are plenty of them that get well above what you are proposing to give them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Transition to free medical care would be difficult. The ACA system caters to insurance companies.

ACA doesn't cater to insurance companies. It caters to partisans in congress who wanted to get some goodwill from their consituents by passing a bill that sounded good on the surface but didn't address any of the actual problems in our system.

It didn't address all of the problems but it certainly helped. Pre-ACA what was the self-employed person with health problems supposed to do?

Instead of recognizing that health insurance makes no sense if the government is paying for everything, ACA was designed to further enrich insurance companies.

It doesn't do that. Insurance companies are absolutely not getting rich off of ACA. Additionally, just eliminating health insurance doesn't fix much at all. On average, health insurers make a profit margin of between 4% and 5%. Anything above about 6% is very rare, and a whole lot of companies have margins in the 2.5% range. Even for-profit health insurers, who run at the top end of the margin range, aren't making bank.

You're forgetting sales costs.

I do agree, however, it isn't the fat prize the bashers think it is.

Doctors, specialists in particular, are a different issue. As are pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers, and medical supply companies. Those all run between 30% and 60% profit margins. Specialist doctors tend to make upwards of $200K per year, and even generalists run at $150K and above. For-profit hospitals tend to run at higher margins, but there's a lot of variability involved from year to year. At the end of the day, a huge amount of the health cost problems in the US are due to extremely high cost of services on the provider side, paired with over-utilization of a lot of services.

Those numbers are always done before considering things like insurance costs.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How did $5 Trillion turn into half a Trillion?

I'm not sure what constitutes "unrealistic" in your book... but essentially doubling the entire US government revenue in order to support UBI seems like it might be a bit unpalatable to a whole lot of people and businesses.

He's not--that $.5T is what he figures will come off other programs (UBI eliminates most welfare), thus making the bill $4.5T.

While his approach is nuts you're focusing on a bit that's actually correct.

 

[Elixir]

So much of it is not living below your means.

Easy to say when your “means” exceed the immediate demands of food, shelter and clothing. But I don’t imagine you have ever been in any other situation, due to your constant attention to meeting those needs and your unrelenting work ethic, right?

 

[ZiprHead]

What's the point in giving it and turning around and taxing it away?

Because many people do not need the support. Letting rich people keep that unneeded money would just increase the income disparity and make less money available to those that need it.

 

[laughing dog]

With a progressive income tax, a family of 4 would have an UBI income of 60K without working. If a family of 4 who earned 60K before there was UBI paid income tax, why wouldn’t a family with 60K pay income tax.

Is this just an exercise in throwing numbers around with no concern for reality???

No, that’s your specialty.

What's the point in giving it and turning around and taxing it away?

Try thinking instead of reacting. Explain why the source of the income should determine the tax rate.

GDP is one measure of income . US personal income is about 24 trillion.

My point is that UBI does not appear unrealistic in terms of the numbers. I suspect that my conservative estimate of 0.5 trillion is significantly low - SS retirement payments could and should be adjusted, since there is a significant “welfare” portion for low income workers. I know recipents who don’t get 15K now.

But there are plenty of them that get well above what you are proposing to give them.

Do you have a point or do you not understand what “adjusted” means? If a SS recipient received $30K in retirement benefits without UBI, and UBI is $15K, then SS retirement benefits could be adjusted to $15K.

 

[Emily Lake]

So much of it is not living below your means.

Easy to say when your “means” exceed the immediate demands of food, shelter and clothing. But I don’t imagine you have ever been in any other situation, due to your constant attention to meeting those needs and your unrelenting work ethic, right?

Take about 20% off there Squirrely Elixir.

For some people, the situation is such that they don't have sufficient means to meet their immediate needs. But that's not the case for a huge number of people. A huge number of americans have significant debt that was NOT incurred meeting immediate needs. And a whole lot of people make repeated poor decisions with any excess incomes. You keep trying to turn this into some kind of personal attack "you've never been in that situation" sort of thing... but I have. So at a minimum, maybe take a step back from the butthurt here, and at least recognize that reality is a bit of both, and and worst we don't all agree about where the dividing line is.

 

[Emily Lake]

What's the point in giving it and turning around and taxing it away?

Because many people do not need the support. Letting rich people keep that unneeded money would just increase the income disparity and make less money available to those that need it.

Or, and I know this is a crazy idea so hear me out... Or how about we don't give it to the people who don't need it?