re: The Real Fear of $15/hr Min Wage

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Where is that UBI money going to come from? How can you have more people drawing money, than you have taxpayers paying it in?

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I’m no expert on fiscal policy or UBI. But, there’s a few different ways you can implement UBI and with different focus goals. Someone like Milton Friedman basically wanted to eliminate all welfare and replace it with cash payments and stimulate the economy. Others think that the government ought to provide a decent living standard for everybody in the country and then if people want more they ought to work for it.

There are many ways you can pay for UBI and it also depends on how much you want. If you want like $30k a year you’d basically have to just take heaps of money from the Uber rich and that would be difficult to do and it would likely have negative economic impacts. But for say $1k/month it’s much more feasible. Andrew Yang’s main source of funding for his UBI is adding a 10% VAT and cutting some welfare programs. People would choose between $1k/month and their current welfare program. Economic growth from people spending their money and a few other minor taxes would pay for the program.

Another way to pay for UBI would be a wealth tax. It is estimated that $12k a year to every American would cost $3t. Bernie Sanders says his wealth tax (1% on every dollar earned over $32m and progressively increasing) would raise around $4.5T whilst a Wharton study found that it would raise around $3T. This would easily cover UBI. If What Sanders claims is correct then we'd have $1-1.5T left over this could returned to working and middle class americans through tax cuts.