this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
702 points (94.8% liked)
Political Memes
5510 readers
2004 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who's salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won't even read any "wELL aKsHulLy" arguments how great everything really is and how we're all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won't and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it's our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
You can go ahead and reply with your chart that is somehow supposed to make me feel better. I'm sure it will really improve all of our situations.
Yes I am defensive, any reply pointing that it will get blocked before reading.
I disagree; not when you're claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done "RIGHT NOW" as if they're so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I've crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it's simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It's just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn't even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I'll be honest, given the research I'd already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall 'plan') that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn't happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually...
But I digress...if you don't have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of "guaranteed income" to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don't frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like 'obviously we can do this, there's no good reason we can't start doing it "RIGHT NOW"'.
Does the above really sound so "ridiculous"?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I'm coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious "I crunched the numbers" bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I'm not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It's sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don't like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You're arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don't care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won't be me.
Wouldn't be hard to do. Imagine we're talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let's also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.
258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That's the amount you'd need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it's something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it's a big amount of revenue to generate from...somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn't really sustainable.
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn't be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn't working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it's that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it's not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There's a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you've seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying "no matter how strong you are, you simply can't hit the moon with a thrown rock" with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they're full of shit and "lying like a snake" because they didn't talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that's impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that's the fucking point, lmao. You're mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol