The US has near universal basic income for older folks.
No, we don't -- because the amount you get depends on how much you've earned before you're eligible. And because it isn't nearly enough to actually live on (and has stayed flat while living costs have skyrocketed).
The whole point of basic income is that it's (1) unconditional and (2) pegged to actual, real basic living expenses.
The woman in the article receives $1390/month in COLA'd fixed income and free ''major medical'' health care. I can tell you from personal experience: this is ''enough to actually live on''. It's not super comfortable but then we're talking about someone who worked for decades and ended up with a net worth of zero. I'm not assigning blame I'm just restating a fact. Where my family is from in the midwest a studio apartment is $300/month in a safe enough area, and there are plenty of very low cost community resources and activities. Obviously not a highly desirable area but people survive there with a roof over their heads, food on the table, and a community to spend time with. Back to the woman in the article: to me it seems that her real problem isn't poverty but rather clinging to her RV and her wanderlust lifestyle. Which of course she's entitled to do, but we shouldn't look at it as an example of the system failing when it's actually the opposite.
Assuming it's consumer credit (and not student loans) then she's a prime candidate for bankruptcy which would wipe out all her loans. She burns her credit score but it's an easy (probably necessary) trade-off to make. She just needs to move somewhere where her monthly expenses are less than her monthly fixed income, and she will be fine (from a financial perspective).
Exactly. She's already getting her social security and other income. Is she not to blame for 50,000 in credit card debt? Or buying a mobile home, which is never a good investment. It sucks that people are in poverty, but just bailing everyone out after making poor financial decisions is a bad solution.
Cost of living is not the problem (except for healthcare cost inflation, which Medicare could mitigate if someone could gut Congress of representatives preventing Medicare from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies). The problem is that everyone who collects Social Security is living longer.
The question is: How can you continue to provide a high quality of life to seniors without bankrupting the country.
Obviously you can, because real per-capita GDP has more than doubled in forty years. The country is still growing explosively, and can obviously support much higher social security payouts, especially considering we are still spending 1/2 to 2/3 as much on defense which is mostly a monetary black hole (your returns on investment there are probably the lowest of all state expenditures).
So it is important to remember that social security is not a black hole. Some people like my dad exclusively invests his, but for a lot of people it is immediately spent in the economy. The greatest economic stimulus you can produce is direct cash injection into the poor - it produces immediate real goods demand to be met.
It is also why I always go crazy when people talk about "affording" a universal basic income. It is wealth redistribution, not destruction. Wealth is destroyed when it is dedicated to unproductive things, like means testing or incredible bureaucracy. The only risk UBI has is that you redistribute enough that the massive demand increase from the poor does not offset the slowdown of investment at the high end. Its a progressive curve - its not about affordability, it is about finding the maxima that matches peak social stability, equality, and individual prosperity against economic growth and investment.
The answer is universal healthcare, which then becomes a sunk cost for the entire population (Medicare->OneCare).
The answer is removing the social security tax cap at ~$120K (this causes SS to become solvent in perpetuity immediately). This will be done regardless if the SS fund goes broke and must be propped up with the general fund, its just how long you want to kick the can for. (EDIT: Medicare has no cap on the amount of income taxed, only Social Security)
The answer is you increase basic social safety nets that have little marginal cost (there's enough food to feed everyone; distribution is the problem).
The whole point of social security is that it is a social insurance program. It's funded out of workers wages, and paid back to workers in proportion to what they paid in.
If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
> If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
I never said it wasn't. I can hardly shed a tear (for myself included) for anyone making over $120K/year who pays an extra few percents of tax on income to prevent elderly poverty.
I'm coming to appreciate the plight of the middle class at this point. How the hell am I supposed to put away enough savings for a house, retirement for two, and college savings for 2.5 kids? Between myself and my girlfriend, "household" income is around 200k.
I should be exactly the person opposing these tax increases. I'm squarely in the white, male, 95% demographic.
Yet, the more I look at the financial figures for the total population, the more I realize how lucky we really are. I can't conscionablely oppose paying more in taxes. I just wish the system of expenditure was more rational.
> Yet, the more I look at the financial figures for the total population, the more I realize how lucky we really are. I can't conscionablely oppose paying more in taxes. I just wish the system of expenditure was more rational.
I am not opposed to the tax rises needed to make social security more effective, but if benefits won't be tied to wages, why should funding come out of special surcharges on wages?
If we're going to break the logical connection between the wage surtax and social insurance, let's end the surtax and move social security obligations and funding into the regular budget, so that ALL sources of taxation are used to fund SS.
> It's funded out of workers wages, and paid back to workers in proportion to what they paid in.
No, its not. There are "bend points" where the ratio of earnings to benefits is reduced. (The benefit is 90% of average indexed monthly earnings up to the first bend point, plus 32% of AIME between the first and second bend point, plus 15% of AIME above the second bend point.)
> If you remove the cap on social security contributions without removing the cap on payouts, how is it anything but a special surcharge on people who earn money from wages?
Since the cap on contributions is a per-working-year cap and the cap on payouts is a maximum limit applied after the formula aggregates the lifetime earnings, there is no strong relationship between the two caps.
OTOH, you could uncap both annual contributions and benefits and you'd still improve the health of the trust fund, just not quite as much as you would if you uncapped only annual contributions, so if that's the only objection, go ahead and uncap both, with or without adding a third bend point.
Until we reverse aging this just pushes people who should have been able to retire into the labor market longer and longer while their bodies fail. That is a terrible punishment to inflict on people who expected to be able to live their later years without suffering.
I should clarify. My COLA statement includes increased medical costs/consumption, longer life, lack of keeping up with GDP, etc. Total lifetime costs might be better phrasing.
> You are being down-voted because the US has near universal basic income for older folks
No, it doesn't. The US has a broadly-applicable mostly-mandatory contribution-weighted public pension program, which is almost entirely unlike a basic income.
It's one of the real questions I have about basic income schemes generally. The examples we have are not powerful arguments in favor of them.