SM20h ago
Scott Santens
$200 billion a year would enable a universal basic income of about $500/mo. That would essentially abolish severe poverty in America. Poverty would drop by about a third, and because the downstream costs of poverty are about $3 TRILLION a year, that would be a return on investment of $800B a year.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:k5nskatzhyxersjilvtnz4lh/post/3mhemb7nnuk2h
Mar 19 at 4:58amWeb
Show threadScott Santens2d ago
For anyone with questions about my math, read this. Yes, everyone gets UBI, but not everyone sees an income boost after taxes. The cost of UBI is lower than most people think when paired with a phaseout tax. Such a tax isn't about raising revenue but about shaping to look like a negative income tax.

The Falling Cost of Basic Inco...
The Falling Cost of Basic Income in the United States, 1967–2024: Estimates for a Plan Large Enough to Eliminate Poverty

This article estimates the cost of Universal Basic Income (UBI) sufficient to eliminate poverty in the United States. It uses the most recent microdata available from the Census Bureau through its Current Population Survey (CPS) public-use microdata files and references historical income data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplements (ASEC) going back to 1967. It finds that UBI (or an equivalent guaranteed income) sufficient to eliminate official poverty is surprisingly affordable and that the cost of UBI as a percentage of GDP has been falling steadily for more than 50 years. Estimates based on the most recent data (from 2024) show the net cost of a UBI set at $16,000 per adult and $8,000 per child (slightly higher than the official poverty line) with a 50 % marginal tax rate is approximately $783.7 billion per year, which is about 2.67 % of GDP. In inflation-adjusted terms, the current cost of a poverty-line UBI as a percentage of GDP has fallen significantly from 9.35 % of GDP in 1967 to 4.95 % in 1995, 3.70 % in 2015, and 2.67 % in 2024. Therefore, as a percentage of GDP, the current cost of a poverty-line UBI is less than one-third (28.6 %) of what it would have cost when the guaranteed income was under discussion in the United States in 1967. This article also updates and significantly improves on calculations made in the article “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations” which appeared in Basic Income Studies in 2017.

De Gruyter Brill