I mean, I specifically answered to your numbers, didn't I? You talked about out billionaires, which would last for maybe half a year, and offered no further budgetary claims.
And I repeatedly said that this is not the only source of income. You also have financial institutions, corporations and many other assets. The economy isn't just made by Billionaires. I mean you won't like to hear this, but if necessary certain industries could be even nationalised. Hell Spain did it already with their health care system and hospitals right now as their answer to the crisis. But before you screech socialism into your screen you should consider that we're not talking about a planet economy here or something like that. Don't worry no one is demanding a collectivization.
Yet.
>_>
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So the US has a GDP of 21 trillion (I was considering the 2017 GDP because that was what was on top). The GDP is not the budget. As I pointed out, the UBI already eats the entire outlays of the actual US federal budget. Social security, healthcare, infrastructure, defense, education. Everything.
Yes but ONLY if you calculate it the way how you do it while completely ignoring the possible benefits. Which I also mentioned. Several times by now. And that's not coming from me. There are known economists out there which have looked at it. You can even find Liberal economists like Friedrich Heyek among some supporters for the UBI, or conservative economist like Charles Murary - an not all of them argue in favour of it because of ideological reasons, Elon Musk for example says it will become simply a necessity he's not really a supporter of it. So there is that.
That means the federal revenue needs to grow massively. In 2018 it was 16.5% of the GDP. Since the UBI would have needed about 19% of the GDP, we'd need to increase the revenue quite a bit and slash the outlays. 5% of the GDP are social security, that's not needed anymore. What about healthcare? That's another 5%, I think that's necessary. Another 3% on retirement funds, veteran help, that kind of stuff. Can be slashed good and hard, I guess. Military spending is like 3%, maybe make it 2%? Education and so on are another 3%, maybe we keep that. 1.6% is interest on national debt, can't get rid of that.
Of course reforms would be required that much is obvious. Just as how we did it in the past when Germany changed in the late 1940s after WW2. Or the US with their New Deal a couple of decades before. Complex social reforms and changes in the wake of a crisis are historically noting new. Again I am not saying it would be easy. But I think it is feasible. Again a large chunk of that money comes right back in to the economy - the term some use here is known as Trickle Up. Just as it does with health care and education already, where it is cheaper to treat people than to let them become sick (as we can see right now) and where it is better for the economy to have educated than illiterate people. No one in their right mind would say, well education costs us us 2 or 3% of our GDP, let us get rid of it and close all schools immediately it's simply to expensive! And why? Because you will have to spend a lot more money to mitigate the effects of not educating the population at least to a certain minimum.
Take another example, Trumps tax cuts alone is expected to cost about $1.5 trillion and that it will cost $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The idea that the money for the UBI is not there is simply a misconception when you look at ALL(!) the potential sources. The way how you calculate here is not how the state runs anyway or we wouldn't have so many social programs already, we probably wouldn't even have any kind of public infrastructure even in the US because it's simply "to expensive", I quote :
The key to understanding the real cost of UBI is understanding the difference between the gross (or upfront) and net (or real) cost. Here’s a simple example: imagine a room with 15 people who want to set up a UBI for the room of $2 per person. The upfront cost of the policy would be $30. The ten richest people in the room are asked to contribute $3 each towards funding it. After they each put in $3, raising the total $30 needed, every person in the room gets their $2 universal basic income. But because the ten richest people in the room contributed $3, and then got $2 back as the UBI, their real, net contribution is in fact $1 each. So the real cost of the UBI is $10.
(...)
True costs
Any UBI estimate that just multiplies the size of the UBI by the population is a red flag that the cost has been over-inflated. A true cost estimate will always discuss who the net beneficiaries will be, who the net contributors will be, and the rate at which we gradually switch people over from being beneficiaries to being contributors as they get richer (this is sometimes called the claw-back rate, the withdrawal rate or the marginal tax rate—which is not an overall tax, but simply the rate at which people start to return their UBI to the communal pot as they earn more.)
Cost estimates that consider the difference between upfront and real cost are a fraction of inflated gross cost estimates. For instance, economist and philosopher Karl Widerquist has shown that to fund a UBI of $12,000 per adult and $6,000 per child every year (while keeping all other spending the same) the US would have to raise an additional $539 billion a year—less than 3% of its GDP. This is a small fraction of the figures that get thrown around of over $3 trillion (the gross cost of this policy.) Karl’s simplified scheme has people slowly start contributing back their UBI in taxes to the common pot as they earn, with net beneficiaries being anyone individually earning less than $24,000 a year.
By inflating the costs and forgetting economic factors like returns from investments or mitigating costs for example in health because more people would have access to healthier food, we're not getting anywhere in the discussion. And this is what I am trying to explain to you here. If I would apply the same logic I could as well ask why we actually fund education or health care, why we're subsidising so many research facilities, why are we spending billions on projects like the LHC or fusion? Why was so much money spend on the space race in the early 60s? And an actual return to it happend often only after decades. Hell why should we "take" tax payer money now and invest it in Fusion for example if the application might only become available in 20 or 50 years or maybe even never. And yet, we do it nonetheless because we see the advantages of doing it, that it isn't just about fusion but also all the inventions along the way to get there. We do it as societies because we understand there is more to things than just only the direct cost in money. Because if you only argue with the up front cost, then you would see absolutely no funding of almost anything that's not somehow related to direct profits. I mean almost every technology we have today was at one point either directly publicly funded or subsidized. Particularly in the medical field.
I am not saying it has to exactly play out like that with the UBI because we never really saw it in effect so far. But what we can say about any social change over the last 150 years is that they have been an improvement to the population and modern society where it either was a huge boost to the economy or lowering the costs for the society. So there is in my opinion a strong case that it will be the same with the UBI. I hold the strong belief that the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages because poverty and fighting poverty for example, is very expensive for any society.
The largest economic cost of child poverty is the reduced future earning potential of children born into poverty. For adults who experienced poverty during childhood, earnings were reduced by a total of $294 billion in 2015. The next largest costs are related to street crime and poor health.
https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2018/09/what-are-the-economic-costs-of-child-poverty
If we take in to account even just some of the positive effects of the UBI than it lowers the costs dramatically.
So let's say about 11% of the GDP is still required spending. Add in the 19% for the UBI, and we get outlays of 30% of the GDP. So the US would need to almost double its federal revenue. That's not exactly easy.
/edit: Other numbers suggest that in the US, about 40% of the GDP is used on government spending. Euro countries are more around 50%. So around half of the entire government spending needs to go into UBI.
So now we're going from "it's easy, the money is right there" to "well, it's not easy and of course it's a large scale transformation of the economy".
I answered a lot of this in the post above, but just this much : I think it is very obvious that we have to transform our economies one way or another anyway, particularly when we look at the fact that pandemics like the one we experience right now might become more common in the foreseeable future due to the destruction of animal habitats. Maybe even worse than the one we see right now. Pandemics might become a recurring event. And we will have to find ways in how to deal with the issue one way or another.
