The Week
America is running out of jobs. It's time for a universal basic income.
Ryan Cooper
h/t Brad DeLong
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Ryan Cooper— America is running out of jobs. It's time for a universal basic income.
The Week
America is running out of jobs. It's time for a universal basic income.
Ryan Cooper
h/t Brad DeLong
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3 comments:
If its gaining traction, why are most of the comments hostile to the idea?
Well, until recently, almost no one was talking about the these ideas, which, or course, are not new, but they had been largely dismissed. Now (post-Piketty) we are talking about them again.
There seems to be a fair amount of buzz about a UBI in the alternative media. Like Tom said, the discussion rarely mentions the alternatives to a UBI. Also, there is rarely any serious discussion of how to "pay for" a UBI. Everybody likes the idea of free money and UBI proponents pretend the "pay-for" is no big deal.
I favor a modest means-tested BIG over a UBI for a couple of reasons. One, a means-tested BIG would be an automatic stabilizer. Two, a means-tested BIG could be cheap enough (roughly $250 billion) to implement without raising taxes.
A UBI could be made to work, but would cost approximately 10 times as much as a BIG (figure 200 million adults in America vs. 20 million poor adults), so we'd be looking at at the biggest tax increase in history in order to "right size" the budget deficit. Lotsa luck with that.
In general, I favor more automatic stabilizers and a very strong safety net. My thinking is that we can't rely on the politicians to manage the economy properly so the next best thing is to have a strong safety net to fall back on and strong automatic stabilizers to fix the economy when the politicians won't.
Thanks for being open minded enough to throw this article out for discussion, Tom.
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