this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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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.