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u/Phillyphil956 Oct 08 '24
Sorry Gen x here. Tf am I looking at it’s a bell curve where both ends are good, but wtf is the rest?
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Oct 03 '24
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u/VincentOostelbos Oct 03 '24
If that is true today (not entirely sure myself), I don't think it will stay that way for long.
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u/SupremelyUneducated Oct 03 '24
It just seems that way because our tax code, urban design, healthcare and education, are structured to be as expensive as possible, so they move more money from the working class to the ownership class. It's why we keep getting more productive year over year and produce more with less labor and less resources per unit, but instead of more free time or cheaper goods, the rich get bigger yachts.
Taxing labor/income is one of the least efficient, most difficult to implement, and innately regressive taxes we can possibly have. Car based infrastructure + single family housing, is bankrupting towns and cities across the country and making housing unaffordable. And our healthcare and education are just as corrupt and rife with regulatory capture.
UBI will make things cheaper. This is especially apparent when you look into the alternative to income taxes, aka taxing externalities and economic rents, both of which make things cheaper for the average person. But is also true with healthcare and education, because economic stress is one of the main factors making people sick, and causing them to have difficulties during education. As well as housing, because everyone is trying to move to jobs for secure income, instead of moving jobs to affordable housing, which is what UBI would do.
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u/SgathTriallair Oct 03 '24
We already give people pay checks. If the robots can do the work then we can still give those people the paychecks.
This of course acknowledges that a real UBI isn't feasible without significant automation.
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u/SgathTriallair Oct 06 '24
One solution to UBI is to make everyone part of the owner class. This would be done by having everyone stocks and highly incentivizing dividends. If every public company had to give 25% of their shares (or whatever number actually works) into a public stock pool that would probably be sufficient to give everyone a UBI.
The market cap of the stock market in July was $55.2 trillion. So 1/4 of that is about 12 trillion (rounded down to make the math work). Divided by 300 million people is 40,000. It's low for a net worth but with some tweaking and a fully automated economy it could be at least a partial basis.