Read it at Crooked Timber
Guaranteed minimum income: how much would it cost? (updated)
John Quiggin | Professor, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and a Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)
Monday, August 6, 2012
John Quiggin — Guaranteed minimum income: how much would it cost? (updated)
Read it at Crooked Timber
Guaranteed minimum income: how much would it cost? (updated)
John Quiggin | Professor, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and a Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)
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"The simplest way to get to a universal basic income would be to pay it to everyone, then recoup the cost, through the tax system, from everyone above the basic level. While conceptually simple, this way of doing things would be almost impossible to implement except as a ‘big bang’, and is also too hard for me to evaluate."
Oh brother. I beg you Tom, please send this guy a link for Google. The answer is $1 or $2 trillion (in 2012 dollars) depending how its structured (Phil Harvey teaches at Rutgers and is actually an ELR fan).
"The cost of a negative income htax (NIT) designed to mimic the redistributive effects of a universal basic income (UBI) and set at a level sufficient to
eliminate official poverty in the US is estimated using income distribution data for 2002. It is estimated that an NIT satisfying these conditions would have required an $826 billion increase in government spending in 2002, compared to a $1.69 trillion increase for an equivalent UBI. Despite this cost difference, the income and substitution effects of a UBI and an equivalent NIT are shown to be the same..."
http://www.philipharvey.info/ubiandnit.pdf
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