If you forcefully confiscated every single penny of net worth every single billionaire citizen has, every single last penny, and distributed it across the population, it would amount to a one time payment of something like 2,000 to everyone else. Simply pushing your "just tax the rich" line just doesn't remotely match up with reality. It requires an elementary level of math to see that taxing the rich more will not fund UBI. (And ignores all the negative consequences of doing so).
It's obviously not just billionaires that would be taxed at a higher rate. The increased taxes (as a percentage) would start at the zero income level. Everyone would get taxed more for their income. The offset of the fixed income part of UBI is constant, which cancels this out to a point, but the curve is always steeper.
Another compensating factor is that UBI replaces a huge swath of pre-existing social welfare programs.
Similarly, UBI is so much easier to manage that it would allow huge numbers of government staff to be made redundant. We would no longer have to have a bunch of bureaucrats tracking and allocating welfare, because everyone would be on welfare. This compensates for the cost also.
Generally speaking, pretty much everyone that would benefit from UBI is already getting roughly equivalent welfare anyway, something all western countries can already afford. Most citizens in most developed countries have a roof over their heads and aren't starving to death, even if they're unemployed.
PS: Australia went through a similar thing were a ludicrously complex set of tax codes were put into the shredder and replaced with a flat 10% VAT. Everybody screeched about prices going up 10% in the exact same way as the people arguing against UBI. Turns out some prices went down because previously the taxes were "randomly" anywhere between 0% and 30% on a product-by-product basis. It took armies of accountants and tax officials to track all that, and that had a real cost to it also. That cost was wiped out by the new, simpler, flat tax code.
But your idea of working harder falls apart though with taxing the middle class for UBI.
Bezos doesn’t work 1M harder than the average worker. But a doctor making $250k definitely works 2-5x harder (education, life and death, training, etc etc).
You’ll find lots of people for taxing Billionnaires but you’re not going to find many takers to tax the 50M people making $125k+ to fund UBI.
There’s no arithmetic model that I’ve seen shows UBI as being feasible without some level of magic.
Like I said: Most western countries are already paying the rough equivalent of UBI to their citizens, except inefficiently with an army of bureaucrats.
Image making $250K and paying $100K in taxes. With UBI, your taxes might go up 20% to 120K, but you get a flat $20K as your basic income, so net... there's zero difference.
If you make $500K and used to pay $220K in tax, then you now pay $264K in income tax but get $20 UBI, for a net tax of $244K. Your total after-tax income decreases from $280K to $256K, a mere 8.6% reduction in your disposable net income.
Are you saying you wouldn't get that job? It pays $256K after tax! Anywhere in the world with that kind of personal income, you're filthy rich, especially if you have a spouse that works.
Okay, so your spouse is an unemployed gold-digger. Guess what: she gets $20K UBI as well, so your family net income is back at $274K, for a mere $6K decrease over the original pre-UBI tax code.
I'm personally in more-or-less this boat, where my spouse is ineligible for all government benefits despite being a stay-at-home Mom, because I make too much money. This disincentivises educated, wealthy people from having kids!
You know who has too many kids? Poor, uneducated people for whom the per-child benefits are worth it. This produces generational poverty, not useful workers for the economy.
Disclaimer: Obviously this is using made-up numbers, any real implementation would have to be adjusted to each economy, existing tax levels, etc, etc...
I’m saying they the math clearly shows there aren’t enough 500k earners who will pay the tax to pay the UBI recipients.
And it frustrates me that people include whether people will or won’t take jobs paying $500k because of higher taxes. It’s not relevant to the discussion of “how will we fund UBI when the most basic calculations show it’s not possible.”
UBI is a good thing, but I think the way we fund it has to be realistically discussed.
I'm saying that most economies are already paying the equivalent amount to a UBI, or close to it.
Most counter-arguments including yours apparently is that UBI is an entirely new tax, not a replacement for existing taxes. Sure, seen like that, it's magic money that falls from the sky. In practice, it's just a simplification of welfare.
No country is paying the amount proposed. If so, please provide. It should be simple by just showing entitlement amount divided by people.
Countries pay substantial amounts but not to the level proposed by UBI amounts.
There’s an argument for just simplifying payouts by leveling and ditching the “army of bureaucrats” and paying out the costs. But that has problems like reducing payout to people who need it and also not being anywhere near $10k or $20k per person. And these seem really obvious and glaring so are peculiar that they aren’t addressed.
