...but think of the billionaires, then they couldn't buy politicians, control the media, and buy bigger yachts.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
1720 points (98.9% liked)
Microblog Memes
7700 readers
3054 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I can’t find the podcast. Maybe someone else can post an article about this:
Several years ago, I listened to a podcast that interviewed a man in Chicago who was conducting a study. His team found people with a criminal history(I think maybe drug dealers?) and tell them they’ll get $1000 a month. No strings attached.
There were a few who didn’t use the money well, but most quit crime/dealing drugs entirely. They found steady work and some went back to school.
All they needed was an opportunity to feel financially safe, feed their kids, and pay rent.
Edit: I think I found it? Here’s an article on it. Some of my facts were wrong, but the idea was right overall.
The article also mentions another called the Stock Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
I’m not sure which I heard about but I suspect the interview was with Richard Wallace who is mentioned in the article. Some of his talking points sounded familiar.
They've been trying it across the world, it's called Universal Basic Income. It's been proven mostly successful every time.
Here's an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
It's not "universal" unless/until it's given to everyone. Until then, it's just another targeted welfare program, "offered to a select portion of a city's population instead of all residents", as your link says.
You can't say UBI has been "proven mostly successful" without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire's net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can't), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I've seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn't even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.? It makes no sense for it to be "universal," we should change the branding. Doesn't make it the bad idea you are so eager to paint it.
Negative income tax solves the "rich people getting 12k/yr they don't 'need'" issue. Beaurocracy/overhead has already been mentioned as another reason.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.?
Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don't, will cost even more. That's one of the main upsides of UBI--no means testing makes it have practically no 'overhead'. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I've had this discussion before. You might want to do some more research and have sources. I would advise you to look at really good sources about the following points:
- "It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone."
- "...would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly."
- "Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth and cutting defense spending wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years"
Your numbers and projected income is way wonky. I'll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced.
You might want to do some more research and have sources.
I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:
- $1000/mo x 12 months in a year = $12000/yr
- Number of working-age (16-64) Americans = ~210 million (I rounded down to 200 and counted working-age only (i.e. no elderly/retired), two things that make my argument WEAKER)
- $12 thousand x 200 million = $2.4 trillion
- Combined net worth of US billionaires is ~4.5 trillion. But hey, I found a much higher estimate that puts it a bit above 6 trillion. That gets you almost a whole extra year!
- Latest US defense spending budget is $850 billion
Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you're left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.
The only thing 'wonky' is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.
P.S. Telling me to "look at really good sources" for 'it's not universal if it's not given to everyone' made me laugh pretty hard.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I’m not the other person but I’ve had this discussion in work before and people have hit back with the following:
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
Now I’m in support of doing more for the average person and taking from corporations but I just don’t know how to argue against their, albeit lacking in actual data, arguments.
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
It's the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.
I don't understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there's more demand? Then more jobs are created. It's a very vague question.
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Yeah! I wanted to specifically call out the study on UBI with formerly incarcerated people.
I know a lot of pushback on UBI is that it will make people lazy, or emboldened criminals. It has the exact opposite effect.
I believe that's manufactured pushback tbh. People who are overworked might think it would make themselves lazy. At first, maybe? To get your thoughts in order, it might look lazy. But most people who feel safe with a steady income want to be productive.
load more comments
(2 replies)
That’s precisely it, there’s lots of evidence which shows that welfare programs are better for creating stable societies.
UBI on top of universal healthcare is far better happiness promotion, violence elimination, than all of the non-health proposals.
public housing is always rationed, and usually ghetoization. It is rarely implemented as government funded abundance of housing that is small to be affordable, and in competition to private scarce supply that maximizes profits and lobbying power to keep housing scarce. Promoting housing abundance along with UBI is path for zero cost government programs where market prices of homes sold cover costs.
strong unions is concerned with high paying jobs for union members, at higher priority than expanding union membership. Less employment. UBI provides universal labour bargaining power including strike pay for organized labour. The freedom to say no and survive is a freedom that is far more important than coercion of companies to support labour unions? or just cheering on labour organization movements.
universal childcare is usually proposed as an institutional/licensed program designed to provide full time employment at living wage levels. UBI empowers people to both pay for childcare, but also be happy to look after fellow parents kids on a rotating basis for people empowered to choose 4 day workweeks, or lets a granny be happy to supplement UBI with a few hours of babysitting without needing to create a giant empire to achieve full time job creation scheme. Motivation for universal childcare is that "bureaucratic tax funded worker empire" with incidental benefits to parents.
free college is necessarily a rationed service. Affordable college with UBI is a pathway for people qualified for college, and who appreciate value over alternative opportunies they could choose instead of college if value is not there, is still a choice most qualified young people would make. Importantly for UBI, young teens can have hope that affording college gives them a future... a reason to study and be engaged in school.
Yes. I don't remember the name of the civilization, but there was an entirely "peaceful" society that existed for several hundred years, until Christopher Columbus showed up, and raped and murdered them all.
No group of people has ever been peaceful with each other, let’s stop this anti-west fantasy and start talking about real problems, like how to fix democracies and capitalism
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/north-american-indigenous-warfare-and-ritual-violence
https://newsofstjohn.com/the-taino-legacy-of-a-peaceful-joyous-and-ingenious-people/
Try again, and stop erasing history. They were unique because they lived on an isolated island, so they didn't have neighbors to make war with.
Oh, and I was misinformed, Columbus didn't wipe them all out, just most of them. Some still exist and have resumed their ancestral ways, apparently.
You wanna know what else makes billionaires billions of dollars? A strong middle class...the one with a lot of disposable income to, you guessed it, spend on goods and services!
Make enough affordable reliable cars then people with the disposable income will buy a new one every 5ish years and then the secondary used car market has good reliable cars to sell
Every dollar the "middle class" has in disposable income is a dollar the billionaires didn't hold onto.
But I don't want money in 5 years, I want it now!
— A 300 lbs toddler with an inherited hedge fund.
the public housing part is like one bad decision from a workhouse, but otherwise yeah
My two thoughts on this:
-
If I ask people for a million dollars to higher cops they'll give it to me easy, if I ask for 100k to reduce crime through community outreach - it's a huge fight
-
That experiment where a class needs to unanimously agree to all recieve 98% final grade but 30% of them absolutely refuse to give themselves a leg up if that also means someone else gets it and they didn't work as hard.
On the flipside, the harder you squeeze the underclass the harder they work. (And they are kept in a state of safe distraction too)
So there's a balance.
Yes, but no one can get fabulously rich off this.