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Trump admin considering giving $10,000 to each person in Greenland to annex the island
(www.latintimes.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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But a UBI would be economically unviable.
Lmao ok.
Sounds like a one time payment.
Well, yeah, it would be.
We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we're running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I'm not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.
(No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)
Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov't for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)
Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I'm saying this as someone that's at the lower end of middle class; I'm not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I'd also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.
Taxing the extremely wealthy and corporations at 90%+ would go far.
I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:
Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.
US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.
Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can't find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we'll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it's all taxed (which it isn't - most isn't considered income). That's 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn't collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.
Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone's income below 1.65M/yr.
Don't get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn't necessary to fund UBI.