"But, UBI is not affordable!" - "Who pays for it?" - "How do you pay for UBI?"

To think UBI is not financially feasible IS a common misconception. Consider this for starters: what is the COST of NOT implementing a UBI?

When someone asks "Who pays?" The response usually is: who pays for any public service in society, such as police forces, roads, clean water services, libraries, schools... that's right, people do!

We do, because that's what we do. It doesn't have to be only the people though. A misconception is in the assumption that only the very wealthy will pay, or that we can't afford to pay for it— both are false.

As you can see and as will be explained below, the implementation can come from combination or multitude of policy decisions.

"Personal Income Tax is the only way to fund UBI!" - False.

There are many proposals and designs for UBI implementations, and many more designs, proposals, and implementations being carried out around the world. We currently pay for many of societies public services via taxes, and there has been historic precedence for other large-scale societal expenditures such as the Works Progress Administration where the government appropriated funds as necessary through income taxes. But personal income taxes are not the only way to fund UBI- and thinking that personal income taxes are the only way to fund it is simply unimaginative. There's a wide variety of ways to fund UBI, such as a carbon-tax, combined with a reduction in bloated programs, and here's a big list of other ideas:

Some more ideas to combine for effective funding of UBI:

Implement resource taxes, and/or robot(automation) taxes.

Reduce government spending on wasteful initiatives or excessive military spending

Reduce government mismanagement and allocation of funds

Eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse of the Welfare State.

Properly tax multination corporations and close harmful tax-haven loopholes

Consider a more fair tax system

Consider a simple increase of the deficit

Consider a negative income tax

Consider a value added tax (VAT)

Consider electronic transactions (APT tax)

Consider a partial Land value tax (LVT)

Consider a flat tax

Some propose variations of personal income tax schemes.

Combine with transaction taxes

Combine with savings taxes

Combine with a Carbon-Tax (Has dual importance for those that believe in science). - No one single tax would be able to completely pay for it, but a combination of the different options. -Some ideas, such as one by Author David J Campbell‏ http://twitter.com/FluidityAuthor encourage us to phase in entirely new socioeconomic systems in parallel with the old. (some via https://twitter.com/All4basicincome/status/849395129525907457)

As you can see, there's many combinations to pick and choose from, authors and policy-makers, scientists and researchers are working directly with informed economists to create policy proposals, they are working together to draft and propose new methods all the time, as well as reviewing existing studies to inform real-world policy introductions. Focusing so heavily on "who will pay" is actually sidestepping away from something much bigger, the moral imperative of a UBI.

The groups of Economists saying UBI is unfeasible because "it will raise people's taxes" and thus "won't be enough" is disingenuous, damaging, and really entirely unimaginative.

The government can appropriate funds where necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriations_bill_(United_States) Personal income tax does not have to be the primary source of funding for things like UBI. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

Reddit user /u/w_v states: "People don't realize that [federal] taxes are not needed to fund any government spending. Sports stadiums don't collect your tickets before they print them in the first place. [...] intuition about how government spending works is totally backwards. The State is the source of all money (it can never go bankrupt) and it recoups a tiny fraction of it in taxes—just enough to maintain a psychosocial need for the currency. A healthy system is one in which the government has a floating currency, has a diversified economy, and is always in debt. Our currency is unpegged (unlike Weimar Germany/Argentina/Zimbabwe/Thailand/any other country that has defaulted in history.) There is no economic reason why we can't fund everything we want/need as a society (the only thing stopping us is inflation and that only occurs when there is too much money in circulation relative to our ability to absorb the money... and we are [...] awesome at absorbing money.)" "It's stupid to keep treating our monetary system as if it were physically limited chunks of rock. We're forcing ourselves to dance with only one leg!" ... "Cash is credit. They're one in the same. The government doesn’t first collect taxes in order to obtain money to spend. It prints the government debt cash first (creates it out of thin air!) and at the end of the year taxes it (deletes it) back into nonexistence. When the government has a surplus it doesn't mean there's more money for everyone—quite the opposite: it means all of us now owe the government more than we can make. The private sector is [in trouble] whenever there's a government surplus. (Government) surpluses should be avoided at all costs! This is why deficit hawks and gold-standard libertarians are [misguided] and should be forced to take a course in economics: Six out of the last seven depressions were preceded by government budget surpluses." "IMPORTANT: The surpluses themselves don't cause the depressions—it would be [wrong] to imply that. But what happens is that less government debt = less private sector savings. Less private sector saving makes the private sector fragile—less robust to outside forces (international markets collapsing, bubbles bursting, etc.)" via Reddit user /u/w_v

... So first we must individually make the choice to step toward a future with UBI implemented. http://list.ly/list/1S4j-ubi-universal-basic-income-101 -It is possible, it is feasible, and it is desirable.

There's something else important to note... the cost of NOT implementing UBI is far far greater than the cost of UBI itself. http://list.ly/list/1RnO-more-than-50-reasons-why-ubi-is-increasingly-imperative

Others have mentioned that we can "dismantle the current inefficient welfare system" however many advocates propose that instead of dismantle we instead significantly improve it's efficiency.

Some have mentioned "Go single payer on medicare, make wealthy people and companies actually pay their taxes" instead of hiding it in sneaky offshore accounts. The government can also adjust tax-levels on corporations for example.

“If you give somebody a dollar, that dollar has to come from somewhere,” -Jason Furman

This could be the most damaging logical fallacy. Zero-Sum means one persons gain means another persons loss, but that's just not how the economy actually works. Banks invent money out of thin air all the time. There's tons of IOU's that can just vanish in finance, there's entrepreneurs who set arbitrary prices every day. People can trade one thing for another thing they deem of equal value and yet may have different opinions of what one item or service vs. another is worth— all this is ignoring one other important aspect that many economists seem to ignore: time. "Profits in the private sector are mostly created from the thin air of IOUs. r > g. The financial sector creates credit at will and circulates it as money, converting the created credit to Fed dollars on demand." /u/smegko http://reddit.com/r/basicincome

Economists will say that Money is "Zero-Sum" and that is an Economic Law. It's difficult to argue that a dollar is not worth a dollar. Money itself might be zero-sum, but the the market, trade, the economy is not. The truth is that money supply in our economic system is often created, such as through credit. Focusing on how Government may or may not respond to the economy is sidestepping and ignoring the many issues that UBI addresses such as poverty, financial inequality, loss of jobs due to automation, coercive elements of culture, homelessness, and the list keeps getting bigger.

One recent development is the suggestion that we can tax automation to help fund UBI: https://medium.com/basic-income/machine-labor-day-d77931dca9a8 - or Rutger Bregman's book.

Once again, considering 'income taxes' alone as the only way to fund UBI is not thinking big enough. Proposals are in the works, and YOU could be the one to change the world with YOUR proposal. Submit your proposals on http://reddit.com/r/basicincome or send it to @basicincomeorg or @scottsantens on twitter, to reach policy designers all over the world.

Another thing to stress is that the question should not be "Can we afford to implement a UBI?" - the question should be "Can we afford NOT to implement a UBI?" - evidence suggests that UBI should've been implemented many years ago.

"Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century— Can the savings of basic income exceed the costs?" - https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-the-social-vaccine-of-the-21st-century-d66dff39073

More ideas here by Gris Anik:

http://www.grisanik.com/blog/basic-income-and-funding---part-1/



http://www.grisanik.com/blog/basic-income-and-funding---part-2/

Further reading:

"UBI Calculations" - A misunderstanding on the real cost of UBI: http://basicincome.org/news/2017/05/real-cost-universal-basic-income/

http://www.scottsantens.com/what-america-spends-per-citizen-per-year-40000

https://medium.com/working-life/why-should-we-support-the-idea-of-an-unconditional-basic-income-8a2680c73dd3

https://medium.com/basic-income/how-we-can-transform-americas-broken-economic-system-to-work-for-everyone-ddba38fc328a

https://medium.com/basic-income/if-we-can-afford-our-current-welfare-system-we-can-afford-basic-income-9ae9b5f186af

More reading: https://twitter.com/JimbauxsJournal/status/848176313768738817 - https://twitter.com/JimbauxsJournal/status/845689829371383808

http://www.scottsantens.com/yeah-but-who-is-going-to-pay-for-it-basic-income-alan-watts