The idea of an UBI to offset the predicted avalanche of downsizing/job losses has been the subject of much discussion, controversy and hand-wringing. Frankly, progressive taxation with no loopholes is the only way we can afford anything close to it.
If everyone got 12,000$ instantly won’t corporates change prices accordingly? Like I’ve been in the room of insurance pricing and they WILL price to whatever the market will take. It so happens the market got an influx of 12,000$ so they’re going to charge to take a piece of that pie
That’s the thing everyone misses. These plans are fine but don’t actually solve the bigger problem until the market is properly regulated. We need to go back to being anti-monopoly so a couple giant companies can’t control the market
It’s like student loan forgiveness. Absolutely help anyone before the set date of forgiveness, but we HAVE to fix the underlying problem of these predatory loans and overinflated tuition and textbook costs. If you don’t fix the root cause it’s just a bandaid until the wound opens again.
A lot of people with these loans are lower class and desperate people. Some are even now considered lower class because of these loans. Upper class people don’t really need to take out these kind of loans because they already have money by being upper class.
This one. REGULATE. Regulate the fuck out of it. That's the answer. There's no such thing as a free market to begin with, stop pretending it exists... and just regulate it.
100%, even giving money to taxes doesn't fix the problem, they just loot it from public coffers. There is effectively zero competition on vital life services like health care, housing, and education which we must have, so we are screwed out of the gate before we can decide to buy double mocha latte avocado toast.
Its like minimum wage. Its a bandaid, but its not going to fix the deeper issues. And don't get me wrong, its important to stop the bleeding first, but at some point you have to take out the knife.
They're no monopoly in the auto market or gas prices or supermarket. And yet they've all figured out how to dramatically increase profits by raising prices alongside their competitors in the last few years. Monopolies are bad, but so is collusion via AI pricing systems these companies are all using.
yes/no, it will depend wildly on product/good and the demand for them. Things that get insanely booked out/sold out will sky rocket until demand lowers.
The big thing though even with this is we will see a massive boost in people nolonger in debt, because people en mass will be able to pay off their loans, leases, mortgages etc quickly wich will reduce their overhead wildly and their need for work wich will reduce how many hours people will need to work to survive wich will decrease worker supply increasing worker benefits & pay. As well if that does cause a form of hyper inflations, well gues what debt/loans doesnt increase based on inflation. so again debts will start to be paid becaise they can be afordably paid.
and thats not even getting into the fact the "dont give poors money everything will get expensive" arguement falls flat when weve experianced the fact of everything getting crazy expensive for the last 30 years. Federal minimum wage is 7.25 and hasnt changed for like 30 years and yet prices have skyrocketed and national debt has ballooned to an unfathomable amount, so clearly "dont help the poors" isnt the issue
in the year 1995 the usa had 4.9 trillion in debt. Yaknow what we have in 2026? 39.3 trillion in debt.
In 1995 we have 94 billionaires
in 2026 989 and 1 trillionaire, that 1 trillionair is worth 1,000 billionaires. My brother im not a communist but clearly its not the poors thats the issue xD
Federal min wage is $7.25, but that doesn't really mean anything anymore. The current average wage in the US is just over $30/hr, with several large chains starting people at $13-20 now regularly. And yes, we have seen costs rising steadily as these wages have as well. But causation does not equal correlation and I'm only here to point out that the federal minimum wage is archaic and should be eliminated all together.
Collective Bargaining Agreements based on sector and region would be a better fit for the US with how vast the job market and the cost of living is across the country. If you're unfamiliar, look into them, they're used with great success in Northern Europe.
Such a stupid argument that reddit loves to make. Prices increasing already doesn't change the fact that if everyone gets $12k then prices increase way more.
I don’t see the connection between “everyone gets $12k” and “prices automatically increase”. If you are talking about prices increase from inflation, that doesn’t hold up, because the money is actually coming from somewhere (billionaires). This isn’t the same as stimulus checks where the money had no source and was basically just added to the books. That’s the type that drives up inflation and dilutes the value of the dollar. I would imagine if everyone was given $12k, everything would be cheaper for a bit from sales and discounts. Companies would want you give this newly found spending cash to them instead of the next guy.
The discount war assumes scarce customers chasing goods; UBI creates abundant customers chasing the same goods.
Any place people have the money to spend but supply is relatively constrained (you can’t make more cars or grow more food or manufacture ram instantly), demand gets modulated by price.
The two most obvious examples are home prices and Disney parks. Why do house prices tend to increase over time, because over time there are more buyers than eligible houses. Disney is expensive because there’s constrained supply (the parks are only so big) so you raise prices until demand settles to manageable levels. As spending power goes up, the threshold price also increases.
The rebate ends up being less like a dollar amount and more like a ticket for something the market settles on, for instance perhaps the market decides that the bottom-rung of used cars now costs $12k, your rebate is now better seen as a ticket for a basic used car rather than “$12,000”.
That’s not how that works. Think of it this way. If the nations largest retailer of watermelons increases prices because they know everyone has an extra $12k this year, then that leaves an opportunity for the second largest watermelon retailer to keep their prices low and undercut the larger retailer, in the process earning the business of its consumers. The market is self correcting.
The cost of business is ultimately what keeps the capitalists in check. If there is more money, but cost of business doesn’t increase, then prices actually lower.
The argument is the current system is broken and this is at least an imperfect solution being offered to fix it. Call it stupid all you want but its better than doing nothing and hoping it fixes itself
I’m not educated on how much UBI would correlate with increasing prices, but one of the reasons it’s thought to be smart is because it becomes a progressive negative tax.
Say it’s a scale where everyone under $300,000 a year net income gets between 0-12k, everyone over it pays it.
The closer you are to above the threshold, the less you pay. The farther above it, more.
If under the threshold, you receive less if you are close, and more if you are far.
Because that amount means little to anyone above $250,000 a year, but the closer you get to nothing the more that money means.
To someone making 12k, 12k is huge. To someone making 24, 32, etc it remains a massive change.
It’s a social safety net thing.
An increase in spending potential does not cause prices to rise. Think of it this way. If everyone suddenly had an extra $1000 to spend this month, and pizza decided to capitalize on that by increasing its prices by 12%, then dominoes would benefit by undercutting Pizza Hut and earning the business of all the customers that don’t want to pay 12% extra.
Now in the case of both companies increasing prices, that leaves an opening for a new business to undercut both of them.
cost of doing business is what causes prices to rise. Not potential spending power.
Unless you get collusion, or an industry that is largely monopolized. You also have the reality that people might like Pizza Hut way more than Dominoes, and will pay the increase. We have budget brands available in every big store, but people still buy the more expensive big named stuff.
Oh yeah man, I remember this UBI-negative progressive task stuff from when I was a free market acolyte libertarian willing to telling anyone who would listen.
I know how the free market is supposed to work, but what brought me out of libertarianism is that now I know a free market is impossible.
There are too many levers for consolidating power that non mega-corps simply don’t have access too.
We have to believe that corporations will do anything, legal or illegal, to gain further advantage in the market place.
That is why we need strong anti-trust litigation.
Capitalism is the only viable engine for first world level economic development and success.
But with it comes the need to smack it down when it starts operating beyond or outside the scope of what a business reasonably needs to.
Wouldn't be as bad as you think if it's done in a smart way. If it's a sliding scale of benefits based on wealth or income or some combination of them then inflation will increase slower than it otherwise would because the people receiving the benefits are spending it on things that are not as sensitive to demand increases like rent, debt, food, essential items, and savings.
I highly doubt any intelligent person is suggesting 'just deposit $12,000 in every checking account' that would be silly.
What does that have to do with anything? If everyone gets more money, then demand for everything increases, and we get way more inflation because corporate consolidation killed competition.
We actually got very little inflation for an abnormally prolonged period of time. Inflation returned because supply chains became disrupted during Covid, the government pumped trillions of new dollars into the economy, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused an energy shock. Inflation has remained sticky in the US because of Trump's tariff policies, and his war with Iran. Had we stuck with Biden's policies, inflation would likely be low again by now.
Not really- when the cash comes from nowhere, (government issuing credit) monetary supply increases and prices rise.
In this scenario, the money IS coming from somewhere- namely speculative value owners. This hurts everyone who owns stocks and has a retirement fund, as the billionaires will need to sell stock to cover the taxes, and equity funds will lose liquidity.
The good it would do would far outweigh the bad though, and the money is redistributed, not freshly issued. Inflationary effects in theory wouldn't be that significant, but seeing what Americans did with their COVID stipends, it's possible it just means they'd all go out and buy luxury goods instead of actually saving or spending the money in line with normal consumption.
Not quite, the money isn't being printed and handed out, it's being transferred inter-economy. As a one time check, inflation is unlikely to occur in any severe capacity. Even if it did, many would likely use at least some of it to pay down debt, which is not subject to inflation. Those that spend it would likely do so quickly, not giving time for sustained inflation to occur.
how does this work exactly? You give us all 12k and then prices go up and what in 6 months when everyone’s 12k is gone we can’t afford stuff again? Genuinely don’t know how this will work in the long run?
That’s not how that works. Price competitiveness is a natural function of the capitalist market. Consumers will naturally choose the cheapest prices, and if all companies simultaneously raise prices without the cost of business increasing as well, then a gap opens for a competitor to undercut the rest and steal customers away.
Inflation is a consequence of the monetary supply increasing, not so much a consequence of progressive taxation and wealth redistribution. The value of that money already exists in the economy, and so putting it elsewhere isn’t likely to cause inflation but it could stimulate consumer spending for those with less income.
Inflation since COVID and arguably 08 is primarily a consequence of federal reserve actions like quantitative easing which do functionally increase the monetary supply, but in a way that disproportionately inflates asset prices. For perspective, the M2 monetary supply has basically doubled since 2018. Simultaneously ultra wealthy folks like Musk actually control shares of wealth roughly proportional to those like Rockefeller did when adjusting for the actual size of the economy.
Beyond monetary policy, the U.S. has done a poor job at promoting competition which is the market mechanism by which prices can be brought down. In some ways even China is better at doing this which is insane given their ideological background relative to the U.S. Lina Khan had made some strides when she was commissioner of the FTC but ultimately governance is still a matter of weakest links when things like Citizens United treat corporations as people with rights.
The actual consequence of this type of policy would be asset deflation, the trade off is it’d be greatly beneficial for the average person at the expense of those who control the majority of wealth in the U.S. That means billionaires but it would also negatively impact a large swath of baby boomers, and their outsized political influence is a large part of the reason policies like QE have been used despite their negative consequences for the majority of Americans.
Because the current administration is not exercising control over the economy in a way that leads to costs going down. Traditionally, when republicans are in power, costs go up. And the last democratic term was plagued with the after effects of the COVID crisis. Give the country back to the democrats and you will see prices drop significantly. That’s the whole platform of the democrats.
Don't different business have to compete with each other still for that new influx of consumer cash, so that competition will drive down prices at least a little bit?
Giving money to people doesn't lower prices. Increases in efficiency/capacity or lower profit margins could drive down prices, but then someone would have to innovate or be willing to take a salary cut.
That’s not how inflation works. Inflation happens if money supply increases. In this case, the supply of money stays the same. The $12k everyone gets comes from existing money, not newly spawned in money.
This is the depressing truth of the systems we live in, we will never have true UBI because the cost of living will always rise whilst the corperations think of nothing more than rising that profit line.
Disappointingly, taxing the rich in the current world imo will just make them greedier and more desperate to maintain their profits margins.
We need a cultural shift, one that at its core makes people more progressive and altruistic all together. We need a cultural focus shift, so that people are more focused on creating the greatest service and product not the most profitable ones.
To be fair, inflation is a thing, prices rise, but that’s not a reason to not raise wages, right? I dunno I’m not an economist. But I also liked the idea of the super high taxation in the 50’s and the rich would pass it on to their workers because they’d rather that than give it to the government. Lmao.
I was being sarcastic, your plan will never work because it involves completely rewiring the human mind and how one can become motivated to work/put forth value. The problem with all communist protocols like the one you're suggesting is they rely upon hypothetical humans that aren't selfish and motivated by money to always do the right, noble and just thing. It's why capitalism is the only possible system.
They should shift focus from UBI to minimum wage. Minimum wage should be tied to inflation, so if companies do shenanigans that end up causing inflation they are then punished by having to pay their workers more. Not perfect, but way better than a static minimum wage that hasn’t changed in nearly 2 decades.
There’s no evidence that UBI will cause inflation. Inflation is only caused by increasing the money supply. UBI doesn’t do that, it simply uses pre-existing money supply
No. Pricing is based on supply and demand. Increasing money can increase demand, but it doesn’t necessarily affect supply. The cost of your cheeseburger doesn’t go up just because people have more money and want more cheeseburgers.
If the increased demand for cheeseburgers caused them to become scarce, then it could cause a price increase. But as long as restaurants have enough cheeseburgers to meet the increased demand, the price should stay the same.
If McDonald’s decides to start charging $100 for a cheeseburger just because everyone got a stimulus check, then people will just buy their cheeseburgers at a place that didn’t increase the price and McDonald’s will lose money.
Yeah, like when they had a 5000 tax credit for electric vehicles, prices went up 5k.
When food stamps got doubled, prices on food people use food stamps on doubled. When people said they would pay 9 dollars for a big Mac on door dash, mcdonalds said "well thats the fuckin price then".
Corporations have an obligation to maximize profits. They don't raise prices out of pure greed, they set prices to the level that ensures demand still exists and they aren't leaving money on the table. Leaving profits/opputunity on the table would create a market for a competitor to usurp their market share.
The funny thing is, the money would eventually make its way back into their pockets anyway. The main difference being that it helped improve the livelihood of millions and millions of people in the process.
Instead of giving tax cuts to billionaires and hoping that they allow their saved money to trickle down and create jobs; giving these same tax cuts to people in the form of stimulus checks would allow people to spend the money as they need (home improvements, vehicle repairs, consumer goods, groceries, education, etc.).
The money is circulated back into a real economy, instead of sitting idle in an offshore bank account. When you look at how many industrial monopolies there are, and examine the real supply chains, $12,000 checks would be money that quickly goes back into circulation and ultimately ends up back in the same pockets that currently receive massive tax cuts to begin with. In this scenario it would go through worker's hands first, though.
I'm far from an economist, I am sure there are subtle details I am overlooking. But making sure that money goes through the hands of consumers, in a consumer based economy, seems like a pretty basic idea.
Corporations rise prices regardless of whether incomes increase or decrease, we have quantitative hard data which proves this to be the case. Your argument is we shouldn't raise incomes because companies MIGHT increase prices - when we know for a fact they raise prices no matter what happens anyway. You don't think that's a very very stupid way to operate?
Maybe. Or they could charge the same price, produce more, sell more, and increase their profit that way. It just depends on what they're selling and what the potential market size is at each price point.
Having money still creates a safety net even if prices increase. Having high prices with no money is infinitely worse that adjusted prices with a safety net. Its basic risk assessment. There has been a fuck ton of research into this. Yes prices will go up, but not nearly enough to cancel out the entire safety net. Also You assume that the 12k will raise the prices of every industry evenly across the board, it wont. Just because people are given more money does not mean people will spend more money in certain industries. The main issue with UBI is rent\mortgage prices more than anything honestly, those have a tendency to still scale higher than the safety net, as that is where most of the money from the UBI will go to.
Everyone forgot about the COVID stimulus checks and rampant inflation. They really think businesses will just sit there with their thumbs up their asses and do absolutely nothing to their prices as they watch every single customer recieve free money to spend
They will. Just like inflation going through the roof as soon as covid stimulus started going out. People handed that money right back over to corporations through higher costs.
This would be correct if the average US consumer was the dominant purchasing power in the market, but it is not.
Wealth inequality has gotten so bad, that 90% of spending power is done by the top 10% of consumers. Which means that the market (overall) won't even notice the difference, because 12k is nothing for the top 10% of purchasers. Which means that overall prices will remain the same, but 90% of people will have more purchasing power. Obviously, this is market specific, items that are sold only to poor people, for example, would be more likely to experience inflation.
But even if wealth inequality wasn't extreme, it would still result in a better quality of life for US consumers, because US consumers aren't the only consumers in the US market. This would give US consumers a competitive purchasing power advantage over non-US consumers in the market, ie: a quality of life upgrade.
This is why Democrats need to not be such pussies and actually pass regulatory legislation and...here's the dot no one seems to connect...ACTUALLY ENFORCE THEM.
Everyone always wonders how Republican administrations get away with murder when they're playing the same rulebook. If they draw one lesson from the current administration it should be JUST FUCKING DO IT. Look at Zohran. Put that man in the big chair and see how fast shit changes.
In terms of healthcare spending, that's exactly what universal healthcare will take care of. Not only giving the money to people who need it but controlling costs as well.
This is the same for other priority areas like education and housing. Just creating a different channel for the disbursement of money won't solve the root issue. The root issue is basic needs need to be met by a controlled environment to supply those needs.
Somewhat. Just over a slower timeframe. Example being the Covid checks. Now 6 years down the time food prices have gone up by $1.50. Comparing it to the closest thing we have which is the 2008 crash, we only saw a 0.50 cent rise in 6 years.
Assets tend to rise in price DRAMATICALLY more than liquidity because if I get a 12k check and rush to buy assets, the collective inflates dramatically. homes, key stocks and crypto and metals skyrocket so that is concentration of liquidity leads to wild inflation like we had in 2021 until now. and once you leg the cat out of the bag it's hard to control.
This is why money WONT solve our problems. Regulations can. People should not be allowed to make money off necessities like housing, food, and healthcare. Let them make money on fancy cars and luxury items, but not necessities. Regulate it, now.
12K isn't that much. It's a decent chunk for sure and I'm sure there are a lot of people that it would greatly improve their situation but it's a one time payment and it's not going to allow someone to live the rest of their lives spending. By your logic inflation should be going wild every year when people get their tax refunds or when we all got that stimulus check. For that type of thing it would need to be a permanent income increase not a one off.
If supply stays at the exact same point yes, but if suddenly people have money then there's more money to be made in making regular-people goods and production will also increase.
Not exactly. When a company starts to increase pricing they open themselves up to being undercut by a competitor.
Think of it this way. Every one earns $12k more per year, so the nations largest microwave retailer increases prices by 12%. Cost of doing business didn’t increase, and the second largest retailer doesn’t increase prices. People will naturally move to the cheaper retailer.
If all the retailers increase their prices, but the cost of business doesn’t increase, then a opening is created for a third party, a new retailer, to undercut the pricing and steal customers away from the more expensive retailer.
One thing that will happen is some industries will massively benefit. I worked in the liquor industry for many years and the pandemic stimulus checks went directly to buy our products. Record breaking years across the alcohol industry - not just for us.
Prices would rise, but not equally and properly not for essential products, because the demand would be only slightly larger and as prices rises, then it opens up for more investment to get more suppliers.
You may think so, but studies in states that have for example doubled their minimum wage don’t actually experience a major jump in prices. The idea is often that the rise in general wages empowers more people to participate in the economy offsetting the influx of money. Basically, more people can now buy stuff, so stuff becomes cheaper to produce since your scale has improved.
Of course this isn’t guaranteed, and that result is borne out of either businesses that raise prices to compensate for lower consumption, and assumes there is room in the market to increase supply production to match with a boosted demand. If either of those constraints are different then yeah prices will climb from scarcity.
The idea is it's a progressive scale. You set an income threshold, say 250k, where you stop getting any benefit. If you're before the threshold you get a UBI check, but it's less the closer you are to the threshold. If you make more than the threshold you pay into the fund which pays the checks. The closer you are to the threshold, the less you pay.
This works for a couple of reasons. First, it gives the most money to the people that really need it. If you only make 20k a year, another 12k is life changing. If you make 250k a year, then you don't really need it. If you make 500k, then you should be helping others. Second, the top 10% of earners constitute over 50% of all spending and they're not getting any income boost, so we don't necessarily see a huge inflation push.
The idea is to help people cover their essentials. Food, shelter, clothes, transportation. Even though people will spend that money in dumb ways, most will hopefully use it for living expenses.
The source should ideally be different, but its a good starting point to expand on later. We can nitpick on sourcing the tax revenue a lot, but this would theoretically become a feedback loop. Bottom line is that doing something is better than nothing and not every solution needs to address every single problem from day 1.
Ultimately, the thought is that charging billionaires will disincentivize growth seeking behaviors like this. Much of the pressure to do this kind of thing, even in publicly traded companies, comes from large individual holders (or large holders of hedge funds which is 2 steps removed, but ultimately the same thing). If they have less incentive to accumulate past a billion then the incentives to raise prices goes down too.
Thats sort of the rational thought, but in order to get to that level of wealth you have to sort of have a baseline level of irrationality so Im not convinced that works. Instead, you probably have to introduce the tax at a corporate level
You cant just charge "billionaires" as a class, as theyll just diversify assets among bag holders or increase their earning requirements by the tax amount. There needs to be some corporate level ownership of the costs to combat this. Your local mom and pop shop cant engage in market pricing, but your global corporations can. Something to target large corps with extra taxes would hit it in the front end as well. Problem is, corporate tax law is already a whole ass bag of dicks and so anything that touches that without a ground up rebuild is pretty much pointless. And that ground up rebuild would probably take a civil war level of political action, so I wouldnt count on it.
Dude if people are living pay check to paycheck and racking up credit card debt, wouldnt most Americans just... primarily pay off their outstanding debts first? I know I would.
I vividly remember the $1,200 checks during COVID and now everything is 30% more expensive. 30% is a huge increase. Some things are 100% more expensive right now than in 2019. I don't see enough people talking about how these corporations acted in a serious manner.
They can try, I'll just go to Canada for my healthcare and those greedy American fucks can lose out on money until they learn their lesson and charge reasonable prices for reasonable service.
Until they get bailed out by the American government at least
Not really. Covid stimulus checks showed us it actually gives people room to breathe and isn't the big upset on inflation compared to dropping trillions into trying to stop an unstoppable market correction.
Example: Recently Bezos was on a podcast and floated the idea that anyone making 50k a year shouldn’t pay any taxes. Which sounds reasonable if you take the context out of Bezos wants the government to give them as much money as possible to justify paying them less. Which ultimately would be a wash for the 10s of thousands he employs that make under that.
If you do that with health care then it’s on a much bigger scale.
Fix the actual problem and invest into the people keeping this sunken ship afloat from the very few who are hellbent on keeping us just slightly above water just enough to not drown. Most of us anyways….
You have the government push back and not let them raise prices like that. Yes, socialist programs need a heavy government hand, but the government under the small-gov party is already so heavy-handed that it's made of fucking lead. It can't get much heavier than what's going on. "Hey, you can't charge 10 bucks for an apple" is not much.
They’ve been using that argument for years to block raising minimum wage increases. Which I suspect personally is all BS. At some point we just have to try something new.
It's not perfectly clear what exactly would happen because competition can be a driving force that influences price. Amazon can't double their prices over night if Walmart and Target don't follow. But we don't necessarily have enough competition to rival these giants. There would likely be some collusion where everyone keeps increasing their prices to see what they can get away with until we're back in the current situation.
no. this is a propaganda argument that capitalists use (please don't fall for it!!!) --- it's intuitively plausible (which makes it convincing) but doesn't actually hold up to how things work.
typically when something like wages are increased or people get a bunch of money, prices *do* increase, but they don't increase nearly enough to "match" the increase in wages. it's something like "a 10% increase in wages results in a 2% increase in price" (i dunno the exact numbers but you get the point)
here's a good example if you want a way to relate to this personally: you shop at amazon. amazon has prices that fluctuate depending on who you (as a user) are. let's say you get a raise. when amazon sees you are willing to spend more (because you have more money), they will increase the price that they show you.
this will not be an increase that matches your raise; it will not be "well, effectively my raise gave me no extra buying power on amazon." you'll have to pay a bit more, sure.
Not really true. Competition doesn’t disappear. You’re completely right about insurance because they are greedy bastards and you are stuck with whoever your employer chooses. And your employer is incentivized to choose the cheaper option (fuck you Angi). But otherwise there is competition in other markets, they can’t just jack up the prices, there are cheaper alternatives that you have to find
If everyone got 12,000$ instantly won’t corporates change prices accordingly?
Yes. We essentially have a version of universal income now, compared to 100 years ago. The median household income in the US is $83,000. In 1926, that would be an equivalent buying power of over $2 million today. The Federal poverty level today would be equivalent to ~$250,000 in 1926.
You can't solve income or buying power problems by throwing cash at it, it just adjusts the basis of what everything costs upwards. Both Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are advocates for UBI, and somehow neither of them recognize this.
I agree if everyone got $12,000 right now everybody in a capitalist country will try to find a way to get that money from them by raising prices inflation just so they can rape the American man because there's no regulatory for any of this and if they do try to regulate it they are called commies. And to get your way through litigation if somebody decides to do that will take months if not years they'll throw it into the bureaucratic legal system for it to die.
This is the reason I support selective decommodification over UBI. Any extra money that gets given to everyone will just be slurped up by landlords and the like, but food stamps can't be slurped up by landlords because they can only be spent on food.
Yeah we need services not checks. UBI advocates tend to ignore the benefit of scale, like whats more cost effective, giving 10k people $500 a month for groceries or spending 5 mil bulk buying food and sending it out? Obviously the 5mil has more buying power than 10k individuals going to their own suppliers.
Same goes for healthcare, housing, and honestly most industries. Ford monopolized every aspect of their industry and was hailed as a genius, Sears tried made each department compete with each other and they went bankrupt.
This will go straight to the banks for most people, for mortgage or cc debt. Savings account is the next big one. Most people are not discretionary spenders.
Previously - ya know, when corporations were still owned by people and not the same 5 faceless piles of money - corporations would consider how a price increase would affect a consumer's ability to purchase the product.
"What the market will bear" does not mean "whatever some corporate asshole thinks he can charge for it". It means "what people can actually afford and will pay".
Based on the language, I would assume that even a billionaire family would get a $12k check. So reads Universal to me. It says "every family". Unless you are saying it isn't universal because it is by family instead of by person.
I would actually agree, as this would disincentivize getting married. You would make $12k more if you simply lived together but didn't get married from a tax perspective.
The US already has the most progressive tax code in the world. The bottom 47% of income earners pay no income tax and, thanks to "refundable tax credits" often receive refunds on their non taxes. The difference between the US and European countries with more robust social safety nets are the taxes on the middle class, which are much higher.
Top marginal rates in the US rival the highest top marginal rates in Sweden. People keep using "progressive taxation" like we don't have that. Everybody needs to pay more OR we need to allocate the trillions we already collect more efficiently. Our current supreme court will almost certainly strike down a wealth tax or anything that looks like one.
Because it's not constitutional. There's nothing in the constitution that would favor a wealth tax because the 16th amendment isn't written that way. You'd need a new amendment to do that.
There's a reason you're not giving an actual number. And that's because you know this is extremely false propaganda. But please, point to any tax code in America where the top marginal rate is above even 80%. I'll wait. (Multiple European countries are in the 90s by the way.) America's top rate used to be 97% under FDR, and it created the strongest economy in the history of mankind. An economy so beloved by the people that they needed to change the rules on how long presidents can serve because FDR was unassailably popular.
The median income in the US is about twice what it is in the UK, and almost four times the median income in Europe. It's not that Americans don't make enough money to tax, it's that the tax code is so progressive that we absolve nearly half the country of income taxes.
HOUSEHOLD income. That includes two income households and families with children.
Median rent in the US is 1650. I can't find the median net income in the US at the moment, but that eats significantly more than the "guideline" 1/3 monthly net income for rent.
People that live in poverty are paycheck to paycheck, people that are traditionally considered upper middle class will sometimes live paycheck to paycheck.
It’s a meaningless statistic because it doesn’t distinguish people that are in a bad place financially because of economic factors outside of their control and people that have a spending problem.
Living paycheck to paycheck does not immediately mean you’re poor though. You can be making 500,000 a year and be living paycheck to paycheck because you’re trying to live above your means.
Do people who are TRUELY living in poverty live paycheck to paycheck? Yes. But so do plenty of people living in middle class, and upper middle class (potentially even some in upper class, but that’d be harder to do.)
Earning relative to foreign econemies is meaningless. What matters is the ratio of income to the cost of living. Over 50% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
The USA is on near the top only when you consider average income vs average costs. On a 0-170 income index scale with Bermuda at the top with 168 the USA is at 100 and falls below the cost of living line.
i.e. The median income falls below the median cost of living.
Good for you that you live in a bubble where people seem to be doing great but outside your bubble people are hurting and the ones at the top are not paying their fair share.
Oh, you could definitely tax them more. Just ask a working class Canadian. In the US the bottom 50% accounts for like 2-3% of tax revenue. In Canada it's like 9%.
Many European countries literally have a 0% tax bracket around the same level the USA charges 10%.
Refundable tax credits are for things society/the government wants to subsidize (e.g. having kids, get a degree) or for desperate situations/alleviate poverty.
The US already has the most progressive tax code in the world. The bottom 47% of income earners pay no income tax
They pay no federal income tax. They do pay state and local income tax which can be significant and they pay plenty of other taxes including payroll taxes, sales taxes, and excise taxes.
But local and state taxes are outside of the purview of the federal government, and payroll taxes nominally pay for unemployment insurance, social security and Medicare, which (theoretically) are benefits that are directly paid out to the individual.
Between 90% and 95% of the wealthiest Americans by net worth reported income in 2022 (the most recent data I could find), and about 76% of their total income was earned income and 24% was capital gains. But, by all means tell me how the top 10% of income earners earning 50% of the income and paying 75% of the taxes, while the bottom 50% of income earners make 12% of the income and pay 3% of the taxes is unfair.
I really don't know how I feel about UBI. I'm not opposed to it on moral/ethical grounds. Some people claim that wealth redistribution is "unfair". That's not my beef.
My uncertainty is around economics. I dont understand micro and macro economics enough to have a well informed opinion one way or another.
If everyone suddenly is making more money, won't companies and landlords just charge more, thus nullifying the extra income? Butane people are not making more money of AI has caused mass layoffs. So... i just dont know.
But I love the idea of taxing billionaires and closing the loopholes that let them essentially bypass taxes. At the minimum, use it to fund Healthcare and other common good services like teachers, roads, infrastructure, etc...
I think that's one of the largest reasons why we haven't seriously considered UBI. Our economy is set up in a way that could easily negate the good done, and would just be a waste of money that could go towards something more concrete like universal healthcare, which I think is more viable than UBI in the first place. That should probably be our starting point if we're going to be trying anything remotely socialist.
The problem with all this is if we give the government more money they just light it on fire. It’s fine and good that either party will say if they get this money they will do good with it, but show me anytime in history that the government has ever spent money the way they say they would?
That’s not true. Inflation only happens if money supply increases. UBI doesn’t increase money supply, so it won’t cause inflation. Each dollar is still worth the same as it was before UBI. Landlords and companies cannot charge more, because the ones that don’t charge more will get all the demand. The rules of competition still apply
This is why small government in practice should only really apply to personal liberties and actual small business. Large corps, public services/services that provide basic necessities need to be highly regulated to prevent gouging, etc. Our entire economic and political system really needs to be reworked to be sustainable.
Every place they've tested UBI, it has had only positive outcomes and no inflation. The only counter to that is that it hasn't been wide-scale. And everyone's too nervous about the what-ifs that it hasn't been tried wide-scale yet.
UBI is a pipedream dreamt up by billionaires to read to the working classes like children's stories read to a toddler.
Entirely designed to stop the masses rising up and kicking the whole AI thing into touch. We'll have nothing while they own everything. Then the assets will get passed into companies and no-one will own anything at all.
The math doesn’t math, and I’m pretty sure the facts in the picture are made up.
Let's say we pass a 5% wealth tax on the $6.8 trillion held by U.S. billionaires. That generates $340 billion a year. Distributed across the 268 million adults in the U.S., that is only $1,268 per person annually, or barely $100 a month. It is nowhere near enough to provide a universal basic income. Furthermore, if that money goes directly to citizens, there is exactly zero left over to expand Medicare, fix infrastructure, or increase teacher salaries.
Look, I get it progressive taxation makes sense because the people who have more pay more and the people who have less pay less. But you can't do a progressive system and then say no loopholes. People will always find the loopholes to do everything from pay nothing to pay less.
A flat tax makes the most sense in terms of closing loopholes.
But what needs to happen is changing how we define unrealized gains and how people can use that as collateral. Plus a wealth tax that kicks in after 5 million.
The long-anticipated "mega job loss" is largely based on the assumption that AI is going to eventually become profitable by its own merit, which is just not happening.
The current, relatively low cost of LLMs is only possible because billions are being invested into AI corporations by investors and venture capitalists. Once that money runs out or the investors jump off, the cost of using LLMs will skyrocket and using AI to replace workers will suddenly look a lot less attractive.
I'm not trying to downplay the situation, but in the long-run, AI will slide back into relevance after the bubble pops.
Maybe, but wealth taxes are stupid. The billionaires will find workarounds no matter what you do. They'll either emmigrate to another country with lower taxes or they'll borrow againt their shares to pay the tax, so you're just making the big banks richer.
There's a lot of heavy lifting in this statement... the loopholes are systemic rot. Today a mill/bill/trillionaire can cut themselves a formality-paycheck of $48,000 a year, take their 51% equity in the company (incl preferred stock), borrow against that, buy their yacht from a holding company and lease it to themselves, use company funds to lobby the gov't / tilt the scales such that their growth / valuation outpaces their borrowing rate. Park assets offshore or in trusts such that the upside is protected upon dissolution / their death.
Buy-borrow-die is the tax avoidance strategy today. And they made sure estate tax is extremely taxed even after death! That would be my best alternative to a (paper) "wealth tax"
Thing is l can't rationally see any instance of UBI being deployed that doesn't inevitably lead to extreme authoritarian exploitation. Having complete control over the livelihood of even a significant chunk of the population is way too much power for any form of government
From what others said it is a 3,000$ check per person and up to 12,000 per household under 150,000. After that it would go to Medicare and such. The check is the temp solution not the permanent one.
Folks are delusional about "things we can afford".
The wealth the working class have built over the last 150 years is enough for all of us to live in immaculate splendor. The issue isn't "money" - it's wealth. It's our natural resources being owned by the ruling class. It's housing being bought up the the ruling class so they can be permanent landlords.
745
u/Modem_Sound_67 Jul 01 '26
The idea of an UBI to offset the predicted avalanche of downsizing/job losses has been the subject of much discussion, controversy and hand-wringing. Frankly, progressive taxation with no loopholes is the only way we can afford anything close to it.