That's an absolutely enormous claim to make with zero evidence.

The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation.

Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.

But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.

I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore).

That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible.

I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends.

I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing.

It's rough out there.

Well I can tell you that I work 40+ hours a week and am very unhappy my neighbor has a more expensive house than me. Someone should do something!

All the proposals I’ve seen would set the marginal tax rate on the 120 so high that his earnings would end up more like 40k from the 120k job and then he gets his 60. So, still some benefit to working, but a very progressive tax rate on higher earnings. Not sure I agree with this, but that is what I’ve seen.

Your neighbor would get $60K UBI but their tax bill would go up by $80K because the government needs tax revenue to pay the UBI.

For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.

You could put a 100% tax on revenues (not profit) of AI companies and it would come out to a low couple hundred dollars per person per year right now.

A 60% corporate tax rate wouldn’t get to the levels needed for UBI proposals either.

They’ll just find a way to have $0 of profit. You have nothing to tax.

This is one of the most horrifying comments I've ever read on this website. It's practically a dare to engage in civil war or violent revolution. People fundamentally experience life as relative - as changes. You can't "deprogram" intrinsic human nature. You can just wait 80 years for everybody who's not used to the new hell to die.

Have you lived on 12k?

24k puts you near poverty level. $1k per month will cover food expenses, it won't cover transport, shelter, and certainly not medical. On 12k per year you have enough money for food and praying that an emergency doesn't happen. It's hard enough living on 40k, and I'm not even in a place where costs are expensive.

“Let them eat cake,” or whatever.

Telling a bunch of people they should accept being poorer has always worked out historically.

> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard

I get where you're coming from. But this is politically unworkable, and for good reason. If AI increases productivity, that means more wealth, which means living standards should go up.

It didn't even occur to me that this might not be sarcasm until I read the other comments. Still fighting to hold onto that assumption.

You mean 12k a year with free housing and free health insurance?

These years, knowing what is tongue-in-cheek can be very difficult.

Many of us see the current US administration as being either real life modern nazis or heavily influenced by such.

So I was wondering; are you being serious?

You basic income is 12k? Congratulations, your rent just went up 12k a year.

"lifestyle expectations"

$12k might be nice in parts of Asia, but when the average rent is $1200/month, it doesn't go very far anywhere in the US.

The historic origins of UBI are from political parties that wanted most of those same things, too, especially raising the minimum wage and expanding medicare to everyone.

A strong minimum wage makes UBI more attractive. More people will want jobs in addition to UBI. UBI is also seen as a market force to naturally drive minimum wage up, because UBI offers workers more choices: more opportunities to build a startup or take a sabbatical instead of work 40 hours. The labor market has to compete with that "opportunity cost" in ways it doesn't need to care about today. It would increase liquidity in the labor market and in terms going all the way back to even Adam Smith, make the market more free. Wages would better reflect demand for the work if laborers had more choices at more times in their lives where and how much to work.

Medicare for Everyone and Universal Health Care make UBI simpler. Health risk is always going to be variable and insurance-like risk pooling will always be a good idea for society to defray costs in bad years from surpluses in good ones and defray costs from unhealthy people by considering how many people are kept healthy. UBI could be designed to try cover much of health care, but it is never going to be as efficient as a pooled single payer. If a country already has Universal Health Case, the conversations about UBI get a lot simpler. It is a lot easier to sell it is a flat universal grant. Your health care can be provided by a complex risk pool and smart accountants doing a lot of smart math on your behalf. Your UBI can be just a flat number. Simpler: you can think about how you spend your UBI without having to consider your predicted health outcomes in that period of time. UBI's flat universal value can be set on benchmarks that don't need need complex amortization schedules and risk analysis.

The Canadian Social Credit Party, formed to espouse UBI was one of the keys to building Canada's Universal Health Care and their priority was that first, then UBI. That still seems the best priority order to me.

Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name. If you're giving people more money in exchange for nothing (or nothing of any value to anyone, as in the case of a job guarantee), it's effectively indistinguishable from UBI.

So the problem with 3 out of 4 of your challenges is that, right now, it means young people need to work more to achieve them. Money is an issue, but money by itself cannot solve it, it really needs to be backed with more people working. That's not going to happen, in fact, less people will work.

So without AI, the path forward is obvious: those 3 will become worse. Lowering retirement age, raising minimum wage, and expanding medicare won't happen without AI. They can't.

We already are reasonably close to a job guarantee. If unemployed people would accept any job, unemployment would drop by a lot. Not to zero, obviously, but a lot. Unemployment is also pretty low by historical standards, so fixing unemployment with a job guarantee can't fix much. We'll need something else.

> It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be hyperdeflationary so no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff.

So yeah, I disagree. If you're going to assume AI will just jump to how capable it'll be 100 years from now, then you need to think a bit deeper. What AI effectively does, it provides capital-based labor. You buy a robot. Robot costs a lot, but operational expenses are marginal, energy and (maybe) "tokens". Add solar power, and let's say local AI becomes a thing, at least for normal robots, and you need nothing other than the initial cost of the robot.

Okay, so this will mean everything can be staffed with tens of thousands of these robots. Remote mine? No problem. 500 robots in your house? Why not. Cleaning very large facilities? Not a problem. Farm hundreds of square kilometers? Fine. Dig a canal to avoid the strait of Hormuz and just do it with shovels? Let's get to it. AI can be a universal machine that can do anything labor can achieve.

Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.

What if the machine in this context is 3x as productive as you?

The solution to the subsequent devaluation of labor, and ability for tech oligarchs to pocket the cash instead, will not be found in capitalism.

Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table.

UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.

The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.