Squareallworthy on UBI Plans
Astral Codex Ten Podcast · Jeremiah Prophet
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Show Notes
I want to signal-boost Tumblr user squareallworthy's analysis of various UBI plans:
1. Jensen et al's plan 2. Healy et al's plan 3. Andrew Yang's plan 4. Torry's plan 5. Sheahen's plan 6. Dolan's plan 7. Stern and Murray's plans 8. Santens' plan 8½. Varoufakis and Reich's plan 9. Yang's plan, redux
He finds that most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn't come close to covering costs. The rest are too small to actually lift people out of poverty. None of them are at all credible.
These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. "End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!" But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn't people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? "We'll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare" is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let themselves make it fail on basic math.
This is humbling and depressing. And it concludes the intelligent and useful part of this post that signal-boosts the work of a responsible person. Everything below is epistemic status: wild speculation.