What about socialized housing, food, and health care then?
Socialize the essentials, let people work for the non-essentials.
If there isn't enough work to go around for people who want more than a substistence living, start reducing the definition of "full-time" until there is. If only 50% of working aged people can find work, redefine full-time as 24 hours/week
It definitely can work… it depends on the size of ubi and how creative we get. We could for example just say that banks no longer get to do 10-1 fractional reserve banking and instead all the free money gets distributed to their customers accounts. And do a cap and trade carbon system with auctions where all the revenue goes to ubi. And all the revenue from spectrum auctions. And repurposing some existing spending. And printing a little more money. And congestion pricing. Etc, etc…
> banks no longer get to do 10-1 fractional reserve banking
Fractional reserve banking is pretty much an urban myth. Banks create money when they make commercial loans. The Bank of England explains it quite nicely here:
What doesn't work about the math? There are many alternate taxation schemes and strategies that can be tried, such as increasing VAT on certain products, adjusting tax brackets to income changes, higher capital gains taxes on investments, and making tax evasion more difficult.
Don’t you think if it were possible for governments to gain multiples more tax revenue, they would do it already?
Taxes are competitive. If you have extremely high taxes, then the businesses that can move out will move out, leaving a smaller tax base and requiring you to raise taxes even more in a death spiral.
Possibly, but depending on the level of budgetary entrenchment it would prove difficult for some governments. In any case, a staged roll-out is more likely to succeed, with many hurdles along the way.
It's worth repeating that doing nothing increases overall societal costs if large parts of the population become unemployed, whether due to lower statewide income taxes, increased welfare costs, people resorting to grey collar work, and other secondary effects from increased displacement (lower consumer spending, rentals sitting empty, health epidemics, increased crime, etc.). UBI does not have to be a blanket instrument either: rather than income, we can focus on making certain goods and services universally available, such as access to food surpluses that would otherwise be overturned or basic internet access to enable people to remain connected without expensive contracts.
A solution may even exist beyond taxation: making reschooling and job pivoting more accepted within industry, lowering admission costs to tertiary education, or guaranteeing placement of employees when let go on account of automation or cost-cutting. What way the pendulum will swing remains to be seen.
Those corporations still want access to the US / EU / etc. customers so if they move elsewhere to dodge taxes you need to increase tariffs to compensate or deny them access to the market entirely. Those businesses are not irreplacable and they are worth nothing without customers.
No, of course they wouldn't. A politician cares far more about protecting their own wealth than increasing the size of some government department budget.
There won't be UBI, period. Though I could see a future where obsolete people are warehoused in sex-segregated poor houses until they die out, if it's determined that their freedom is threat to stability.
