The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.

That is double current federal and state welfare spending.

I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.

UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.

But surely you can see that if the main selling point of UBI is

"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"

and the alternative is

"Burn the data centers down"

then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?

A UBI is basically impossible to implement on a large scale without there being significant downsides. In what world does increasing the budget by a trillion dollars or more work out well?

I’m not saying it would be revenue neutral, but a UBI would (or should) eliminate a bunch of various other entitlements. Even social security should be relatively non controversial to get rid of.

You seem to think feeding the population is optional. The current form of government and personal asset accumulation is actually much more optional in the situation.

Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.

As opposed to dead people because no one is hiring to pay people to participate in a market they've been evicted from?

Inflation is more likely when the net number of dollars increases without a corresponding increase to production. Taxing earners at a higher rate doesn’t do this. Printing money at the central bank does.

I wholeheartedly agree, these are all "tools" at our disposal. We're just holding them wrong.

> Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.

Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.

Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.

My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe.

Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.

DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.

Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.

estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.

To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).

That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.