LogFAQs > #885803622

Smarkil posted...

Let's say, for the sake of argument, we give about 1500 dollars to each person as a UBI who's making less than 20k per year.

That's where your math really falls apart. It's not simply a matter of giving $1500/month to everyone under the poverty line, it's a matter of giving everyone enough to bring them up to the poverty line on top of what they already have. That dramatically reduces the payout. It should also probably be varied regionally, given that cost of living is nowhere close to constant everywhere, but that gets really freaking complicated and is beyond the scope of this discussion, so we'll assume for now that the numbers more or less balance out overall.

Smarkil posted...

So 77,500,000 x 1500 = 116,280,000,000. 120 billion dollars spent every month to support people under the poverty line. That's roughly 1.5 trillion dollars

It's generally considered very poor practice (at best, at worst it's outright deceitful) not to carry all significant figures until your final value. 77.6m * 1500 * 12 = 1.4 trillion. Hey, I just made a hundred billion dollars (and even that's rounded up, but only from 1.3968, which is very close to 1.4)!

Smarkil posted...

Even if you could get rid of the welfare budget (good f***ing luck),

This is the welfare budget. A UBI would replace the welfare system entirely.

Smarkil posted...

where are you going to get 500 billion from?

400, made lower by your initial overestimation of the payout, but even then there are a number of options. Most notably, incorporating UBI as a sort of reverse income tax would allow for fairly dramatic simplification of the tax code and removal of a lot of the breaks in there (since tax wouldn't be able to reduce somebody's income below a certain level). That closes a lot of the loopholes that are used by corporations and the upper class to avoid paying a very sizable amount of taxes. I'm not sure off-hand if the administrative costs of the welfare system are included in that trillion, but that also gets reduced because you don't need nearly as much oversight.

You're also going to get more back in the long run as people end up with better jobs (not having to worry so much about starving makes it a lot more feasible to go to school for something they're actually passionate about), people are healthier (lower stress, reduced incidence of obesity, reduced drug usage), crime rates drop (a lot of crime is born out of desperation)... That's much more of a gamble, but every minimum income experiment that's been conducted has worked out to be a net financial gain, ending with fewer people depending on it than were depending on welfare.
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