The Intellectual Dark Web

[DBTrek]

I'll use your numbers man, because the idea is so obviously bad that even the most generous estimations make it look like a disaster.
/shrug

I'm not a math whiz, like I say, I was just asking./shrugs

Well, I'm not a math whiz either, which is why I think my first calculation probably should've been $3.6trillion instead of 36 trillion . . . but I can't remember if I was aggregating current government spending plus new Yang-proposed spending, or if I missed a decimal in the original calculation.

Either way, we can't spend within our limits now. We're already more than a full year of productivity in debt . . . and with your numbers Yang will add another $121trillion of debt on top of that over his four year term. That's more than 5x our current, staggering debt. IT's just not doable, man. The productivity to back it up isn't there. We can print the money and hand it out, but without the productivity to back it we're printing Zimbabwe bills.
/shrug

[TheReal_ND]

Really, when you think of it, the main beneficiary of UBI is working class whites. UBI cuts through all the red tape and beuracratic jungle to get the money right where it needs to be. Me.

[Smitty-48]

Really, when you think of it, the main beneficiary of UBI is working class whites. UBI cuts through all the red tape and beuracratic jungle to get the money right where it needs to be.

Exactly. No affirmative action, the WCW's would actually get a taste for change without the Mule & Forty Acres mandate status quo.

[DBTrek]

No, it doesn't need to be in the hands of impulsive consumers with immediate Taco Bell wants. Those people have never driven anything in this country, except a beat-up Honda Accord with 227,000 miles through a drive-thru.

[Smitty-48]

Spartan UBI then, triple the military budget. At least it's spending, the Banks ain't gonna do it.

[TheReal_ND]

Whatever inflation may happen would virtually destroy the buying potential of current gibs recipients as their gibs would not layer on top of UBI in the way Yang invisions UBI to work.

[Speaker to Animals]

Forgot to subtract the 2 trillion for current gibs recipients and their host of beuracrats.

The GDP is not zero sum, 2 trillion injected into the real economy is not a net loss.

The Banks and Silicon Valley have all the cash, but they don't spend it.

It's a closed system unless you literally print money which, when distributed equally across society, is but a euphemism for inflation. For UBI to work, you actually have to take money from one part of the economy and distribute that back out equally to all the participants. Otherwise, you are just fucking around on a treadmill, getting nowhere. You get an extra thousand dollars per month, but all your monthly expenses now cost you an additional thousand dollars.

The problem here is that people are thinking in terms of dollars when, really, the dollars are just metrics for productivity when you are talking about GDP. You can't invent production and consumption out of the nether.

[TheReal_ND]

Actually libertarians should be tripping over themselves to support UBI as whatever else would happen it would certainly abolish the welfare state. As long as UBI is never combined with gibs.

[DBTrek]

So Yang is going to dismantle all of the current, deeply entrenched, welfare systems AND implement a new UBI funded by productivity this country doesn't have?

... because this current guy couldn't get $5.8billion for a wall.

That's what's striking you as a likely course of events?

[Smitty-48]

Work is going to go away, there is literally going to be no work at all, it's not that far away.

You have to get the cash flow going somehow, without work, war then.