Here's the copy-paste of my post a couple of months ago:
Let's do some back of the envelope math here.
316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.
The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.
So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.
At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.
Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.
On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.
Where did you get the figure of $30k/person from? My understanding of basic income is that you'd get only a very, well, basic level of income from it somewhat equivalent to basic unemployment benefits now. In the UK you get something like £65 JSA + £70 Housing Benefit a week which works out something like $10k/year. That's $3 trillion according to your figures[1], or a total budget of $5 trillion. That's a substantial increase to be sure and would be a massive social change but rather more feasible to fund.
[1] In reality you presumably don't pay a full amount to minors.
Let's do some back of the envelope math here.
316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.
The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.
So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.
At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.
Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.
On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite.... [2] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/