
The Case Against a Basic Income - mmirate
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/12/universal-basic-income-inequality-work
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shams93
It could work well under conditions of world wide demilitarization, if we stop
wasting 90% of our resources on war and preparation for war we could have a
pretty massive pie left over.

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valuearb
The US spends far too much on the military, in fact it has the world's largest
military, and in some measures larger than the rest of the world combined. But
it's only 22% of US government spending, and if you include state and local
government spending military spending is less than 20% of total governmental
spending.

[https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2018USbf_...](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2018USbf_19bs2n_001020#usgs302)

The article talked about a totally inadequate UK proposal that would cost over
6% of GDP to implement. The US spends more on the military as a percentage of
GDP than virtually any other first world nation, but even it only spends 4.5%.
If the US eliminated all it's military spending completely, it would still be
many hundreds of billions short of the amount needed for the most barebones
basic income plan.

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mmirate
Oh, it gets better. Many of our allies have so little military spending
precisely because of our military bases on their territory, and our resulting
ability to respond to threats with the same speed as their own military. So in
some ways, we are, for better or worse, the world's policeman. And if we
downsized our military, those nations would need to step theirs up (with
accompanying spending increases on their end). Which makes me wonder if the
U.S. is getting paid enough for our military services to those allies.

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XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Heavy Lies the Crown

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valuearb
Never understood why universal basic income required Warren Buffett and Bill
Gates to get free money every month. It's like no one every learned from the
biggest economic flaw in the US social security program.

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mmirate
Eh? I thought the flaw in US safety nets was the income-based "cliffs",
whereby taking a better job would often _decrease_ a welfare-recipient's
overall income due to the decrease in benefits received.

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mmirate
Notably, this flaw is one of the big reasons why the War on Poverty, and
socialism/UBI/etc. in general, disempowers the poor and the poorly-educated.
Remember, Rome fell to tyranny in part because its citizens became willing to
support anyone who would grant them more bread and circuses.

