"Building infrastructure" is also not a long-term plan. We need it right now because we haven't seriously invested in infrastructure in three generations, but if we spent 10 years building all new bridges then we would be good for another three generations again. Which would be great, but then what?
> Or, lets have one mother watch 4 children - her own and those of 3 strangers. This is a common arrangement in most of the world. Are Americans just somehow less capable than Indians, Mexicans, Peruvians and South Africans?
Which the mother receiving the basic income can still do in return for money or favors or in kind services. But with the basic job, at some point the government says we have enough people providing daycare and you're digging ditches all day even if you would prefer to be raising your kids.
And notice how those arrangements work in other countries (and here for that matter) -- you watch all the kids today, someone else watches all the kids tomorrow. When you're not watching the kids you're washing clothes or doing errands or preparing food. And people tend to be much happier when they're doing that kind of work for their own families and communities than doing it for rude strangers at minimum wage.
> So now take the actual distribution of income in the US (rather than a hypothetical one) and calculate what numbers would be necessary to balance exactly.
OK, let's see. Mean household income is $72,641, there are 122,952K households so total income is $8,931,356,232K, therefore providing a $10,000 basic income for 245M adults would require a flat tax rate of ~27.43%. Or if you like a progressive tax then maybe a 20% bracket and a 30% bracket. And that rate is an overestimate because it doesn't include any revenue from corporate taxes.
A $10k basic income would require a flat tax rate of 27.5%. You realize that welfare/etc provides poor people with $20k, right? So either you are proposing a 50% cut in payments to the poor, or you are proposing 55% flat tax rates.
And that's ignoring taxes needed to fund a functioning government - e.g. roads, law enforcement, blowing up Afghani weddings, etc. So 65-70% flat tax rates? Or just a 37-42% tax rate, plus we've cut wealth transfers in half? Concretely, which one are you proposing?
(Incidentally corporate taxes are just taxes on people, merely hidden from view.)
> You realize that welfare/etc provides poor people with $20k, right?
No it doesn't. You haven't explained where you got your numbers but those numbers are presumably for a household rather than an individual (which would then receive more than one basic income) or some atypical edge case where a person qualifies for an uncharacteristically large collection of benefits.
A basic income is a pure redistributive program. It can't possibly cost more than a program which is more redistributive than it is because there is nowhere else for the rest of the money to go.
> And that's ignoring taxes needed to fund a functioning government - e.g. roads, law enforcement, blowing up Afghani weddings, etc.
All of that other than the military costs a comparatively small amount of money. And we could probably stand to blow up not so many weddings as we do.
> (Incidentally corporate taxes are just taxes on people, merely hidden from view.)
That doesn't mean including it wouldn't reduce the rate. US GDP is $16.7T. Total US personal income from above was $8.9T. That's quite a difference. An economy-wide flat tax would require a rate of ~14.7% for $10,000 per adult and ~29.3% for your unrealistically high $20,000.
And keep in mind that that is the marginal rate. The effective rate under a basic income is lower than that for everyone. If you make $60,000 and pay 15% but get a $10,000 basic income then your effective tax rate is negative, as it is at a 30% rate and $20,000.
And a lot of those people died.
"Building infrastructure" is also not a long-term plan. We need it right now because we haven't seriously invested in infrastructure in three generations, but if we spent 10 years building all new bridges then we would be good for another three generations again. Which would be great, but then what?
> Or, lets have one mother watch 4 children - her own and those of 3 strangers. This is a common arrangement in most of the world. Are Americans just somehow less capable than Indians, Mexicans, Peruvians and South Africans?
Which the mother receiving the basic income can still do in return for money or favors or in kind services. But with the basic job, at some point the government says we have enough people providing daycare and you're digging ditches all day even if you would prefer to be raising your kids.
And notice how those arrangements work in other countries (and here for that matter) -- you watch all the kids today, someone else watches all the kids tomorrow. When you're not watching the kids you're washing clothes or doing errands or preparing food. And people tend to be much happier when they're doing that kind of work for their own families and communities than doing it for rude strangers at minimum wage.
> So now take the actual distribution of income in the US (rather than a hypothetical one) and calculate what numbers would be necessary to balance exactly.
OK, let's see. Mean household income is $72,641, there are 122,952K households so total income is $8,931,356,232K, therefore providing a $10,000 basic income for 245M adults would require a flat tax rate of ~27.43%. Or if you like a progressive tax then maybe a 20% bracket and a 30% bracket. And that rate is an overestimate because it doesn't include any revenue from corporate taxes.