Say in the United States we gave every person 10,000 a year (1,400 below what the government says counts as poverty level for a single person) UBI would cost 3.18 Trillion dollars.

That would be the entirety of the United States budget.

Even with the cost savings of eliminating unemployment, social security, and food stamps there is simply not enough money to pull it off.

Some say well you could make UBI progressive. Ask more of or give less to those above the median household income up to the millionaires. This would require bureaucracy as forms must be filled and incomes checked. Now your cost savings are gone.

Universal Basic Income is unsustainable.

I hate math. Is so stubbornly truthful.

The strategies of cutting our way to UBI or raising corporate taxes to provide everyone with income will not work. These ideas would not be anywhere enough to fund Universal Basic Income. As I stated providing UBI at the poverty level (no where near a living wage) would eat up our entire budget. That already includes the massive and often unnecessary military spending.

Can we cut the budget to UBI? Lets just say you eliminated the military (you can’t but we are being hypothetical) that would result in 600 billions in savings. Just 3.2 billion to go.

Plus drastically cutting the military would result in millions of lost jobs from soldiers to shipbuilders, shopkeepers. For many in this country enlistment is their path to the middle class.

How about foreign aid? Okay we can cut that. Now we have only 3.1 billion and change to go.

So lets talk the tax rate. Yes the corporate tax rate is down since Reagan but that has much to do with many business paying personal taxes rather than corporate taxes. We know corporations do legally shield profits over seas but even if we go with the high estimates of 2.1 trillion dollars much of that would be a one time gain in repatriation…which would be negotiated at a lower rate.

So if you want UBI, again paid at the poverty level, we would need massive tax increases that would devastate the economy. The revenues in the US would almost need to double. That means having a progressive tax bracket that takes 70–80% of the wealth from top earners. This would destroy the economy and lead to massive unemployment.

Maybe we go with a Value Added Tax. These are very regressive and hurt the poor….and still would not double our revenues to pay for UBI.

It is also politically unfeasible. This is a nation where we can’t raise gas taxes a few cents on the logical argument that revenues that pay for the roads are down because cars are more fuel efficient.

UBI is simply unsustainable and belongs in the science fiction from whence it came.