There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
A badly designed instance may be bad, regardless of the class of designed entities to which the instance belongs.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
In the US at least, the primary taxpayers are also the highest cost of living. Many of those in poverty in places like Manhattan or Boston are likely to have their economic position unaltered from UBI (and in the case of Yang’s plan, would have to opt out of UBI). The common answer I see to this is “move to a Red state”. I don’t want to tell a poor minority they need to move away from their family to Arkansas to make ends meet.
Many UBIs are inordinately financed by the poor and/or middle-class. This is not a win to me me.
I’m of the position that the biggest problem with the economy is “market inefficiency”, or to be specific, the profit margins of businesses. The reason the “everyone has housing and food” cost would be $2T, but a conservative UBI would be $4T is the $1T going in the pockets of an entire chain of middlemen, wholesalers, and resellers. If we fix that, UBI becomes less important because we’ve already started socializing. If we don’t fix that, I don’t see UBI being effective.
advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
You have also attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
For the sake of solving the needs of the many, UBI is demonstrably proven more expensive than socializing. I gave reasons and numbers. THIS is the bullet point that made me stop supporting UBI. Socialism, even light-socialism, is just dramatically better at achieving the goals with less societal disruption.
For the sake taking money from the rich, UBI is irrelevant. To quantify better than I have before, it’s irrelevant because it is a mechanism to distribute money, NOT to fund it. The “how to fund” part of UBI would more effectively be used to inject money into non-means-tested social programs that are targeted at problems to solve.
UBI is vaporware. This is not an argument from ignorance. I am actually proposing that a reasonable large-scale UBI might well be entirely impossible. The MINIMUM cited cost for a bare-bones $1000/mo UBI wouldn’t just rise to being the single most expensive social program in US history, but it will be 5x the cost of our military spending and at least 3x more expensive than our current welfare spending. Again, for a barebones UBI that simply isn’t enough money for many households to survive.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
I cannot change how you decide what is terrible. You hold a belief that UBI is terrible. The belief is yours. As long as you hold it, your challenge to me is meaningless.
I repeat my objection about the appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
UBI is simply a regular transfer of money to each household. It works by doing exactly as it does, providing money to households.
What do consider as personally convincing for UBI?
Such is the crux of your participation in the discussion.
For most of the population, the meaningful difference from UBI would be expanded security, against loss of income. Those who are currently in poverty also would benefit more immediately, from additional income.
Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting.
The amount of food being discarded exceeds the amount needed to resolve insecurity and deprivation.
No other observation is required.
All of your statistics are only sidestepping the obvious observation.
UBI is simply the net transfer of money from those that who have too much food to sell, to those who have too little money to buy food.
Once the disparity is resolved through a more favorable distribution money, which is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange, the commodity market for foods would be used for the hungry to purchase food.
The problem of cost is illusory, because the commodity of food is not genuinely scarce, and money is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange.
The same principle applies to other commodities, such as clothing and housing.
I cannot change how you decide what is terrible. You hold a belief that UBI is terrible
So are you saying your idea of a good UBI is Yang’s?
I repeat my objection about the appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
I think we’ll agree to disagree, and I confronted this directly. Your reply doesn’t seem to respond to that direct confrontation. That’s not on me.
What do consider as personally convincing for UBI?
A median quality-of-life increase and normalization. No major detrimental effects to lower- or middle-class (and ideally even lower-upper class, but I’ll give in on that one). A net gain for the economic outlay that meets or exceeds using the same $4T on social programs (or showing that you could do a worthwhile UBI for less, that in a way you can’t do social programs for).
That is, you’d have to show why UBI is "actually better "than social programs. I live in an area where that $1000/mo isn’t going to get someone a shitty studio apartment. So what kind of UBI are you pitching that succeeds in any way? Or, as I asked, is UBI your GOAL, and it doesn’t matter how good it achieves other goals?
For most of the population, the meaningful difference from UBI would be expanded security, against loss of income
What am I missing then? For all of the population, having guaranteed quality housing, food, and healthcare (and let’s throw in mass transit coverage) would have that same effect, with fewer gotchas. Flip-side, nothing will likely be able to stop UBI from being garnishable for debt collection. I won’t get into that topic (since you have already accused me of gish-galloping), but you seem to be arguing “UBI vs nothing” and not “UBI vs any other social use of that money”.
All of your statistics are only sidestepping the obvious observation.
UBI is simply the net transfer of money from those that who have too much food to sell, to those who have too little money to buy food.
Except it isn’t. That’s not a meaningful or accurate definition of UBI. UBI as a concept doesn’t even cover where the money comes from (what you claim is “those who have too much food to sell”), nor does it state how that money will be used by recipients. When Jeff Bezos gets that $1000 check, he’s not spending it on food and we both know it.
The thing that fits that definition would be a form of universal EBT. I’m 100% for a universal EBT.
Once the disparity is resolved through a more favorable distribution money, which is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange, the commodity market for foods would be used for the hungry to purchase food.
Care to prove this? I look at what $1000/mo will buy in my state (since you aren’t objecting to that UBI number), and it doesn’t cover food and housing.
Sorry, I AM adding a new bullet point here. In my view, every UBI plan I’ve seen will redistribute wealth from Blue States to Red States… That is not a partisan point; it redistributes wealth from states that net produce and have higher poverty to states that net consume and have lower poverty. In low-cost-of-living states with low poverty, it provides every individual with a Middle Class income. In high-cost-of-living states with high poverty, it inordinately taxes the middle class while not providing enough money for the poor.
SO my problem with UBI is that the homeless people near me stay homeless, where alternative solutions would give those homeless people homes and food while still giving middle-class QOL to people in the lower-cost-of-living states… and having a significant amount of money floating around to do something else with. (HOPEFULLY no more for the military)
The problem of cost is illusory, because the commodity of food is not genuinely scarce, and money is simply the medium for commodity exchange.
This is interesting. The fact that food isn’t scarce is actually a point I use for socialized food, and NOT UBI.
There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
You also have attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
I cannot change how you decide what is terrible. You hold a belief that UBI is terrible. The belief is yours. As long as you hold it, your challenge to me is meaningless.
I repeat my objection about the appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
UBI is simply a regular transfer of money to each household. It works by doing exactly as it does, providing money to households.
What do consider as personally convincing for UBI?
Such is the crux of your participation in the discussion.
For most of the population, the meaningful difference from UBI would be expanded security, against loss of income. Those who are currently in poverty also would benefit more immediately, from additional income.
The amount of food being discarded exceeds the amount needed to resolve insecurity and deprivation.
No other observation is required.
All of your statistics are only sidestepping the obvious observation.
UBI is simply the net transfer of money from those that who have too much food to sell, to those who have too little money to buy food.
Once the disparity is resolved through a more favorable distribution money, which is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange, the commodity market for foods would be used for the hungry to purchase food.
The problem of cost is illusory, because the commodity of food is not genuinely scarce, and money is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange.
The same principle applies to other commodities, such as clothing and housing.
So are you saying your idea of a good UBI is Yang’s?
I think we’ll agree to disagree, and I confronted this directly. Your reply doesn’t seem to respond to that direct confrontation. That’s not on me.
A median quality-of-life increase and normalization. No major detrimental effects to lower- or middle-class (and ideally even lower-upper class, but I’ll give in on that one). A net gain for the economic outlay that meets or exceeds using the same $4T on social programs (or showing that you could do a worthwhile UBI for less, that in a way you can’t do social programs for).
That is, you’d have to show why UBI is "actually better "than social programs. I live in an area where that $1000/mo isn’t going to get someone a shitty studio apartment. So what kind of UBI are you pitching that succeeds in any way? Or, as I asked, is UBI your GOAL, and it doesn’t matter how good it achieves other goals?
What am I missing then? For all of the population, having guaranteed quality housing, food, and healthcare (and let’s throw in mass transit coverage) would have that same effect, with fewer gotchas. Flip-side, nothing will likely be able to stop UBI from being garnishable for debt collection. I won’t get into that topic (since you have already accused me of gish-galloping), but you seem to be arguing “UBI vs nothing” and not “UBI vs any other social use of that money”.
Except it isn’t. That’s not a meaningful or accurate definition of UBI. UBI as a concept doesn’t even cover where the money comes from (what you claim is “those who have too much food to sell”), nor does it state how that money will be used by recipients. When Jeff Bezos gets that $1000 check, he’s not spending it on food and we both know it.
The thing that fits that definition would be a form of universal EBT. I’m 100% for a universal EBT.
Care to prove this? I look at what $1000/mo will buy in my state (since you aren’t objecting to that UBI number), and it doesn’t cover food and housing.
Sorry, I AM adding a new bullet point here. In my view, every UBI plan I’ve seen will redistribute wealth from Blue States to Red States… That is not a partisan point; it redistributes wealth from states that net produce and have higher poverty to states that net consume and have lower poverty. In low-cost-of-living states with low poverty, it provides every individual with a Middle Class income. In high-cost-of-living states with high poverty, it inordinately taxes the middle class while not providing enough money for the poor.
SO my problem with UBI is that the homeless people near me stay homeless, where alternative solutions would give those homeless people homes and food while still giving middle-class QOL to people in the lower-cost-of-living states… and having a significant amount of money floating around to do something else with. (HOPEFULLY no more for the military)
This is interesting. The fact that food isn’t scarce is actually a point I use for socialized food, and NOT UBI.