A Basic Income: Time to Study
A really riveting and thoughtful piece this morning on the Saturday essay in the WSJ: A Guaranteed Income for Every American.
This is definitely worth more study.
Here’s the basic concept from Murray. First:
A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them …The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.
Second:
The system has to be designed with certain key features. In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives.
Third:
People can make up to $30,000 in earned income without losing a penny of the grant. After $30,000, a graduated surtax reimburses part of the grant, which would drop to $6,500 (but no lower) when an individual reaches $60,000 of earned income. Why should people making good incomes retain any part of the UBI? Because they will be losing Social Security and Medicare, and they need to be compensated.
I don’t know if this is economic feasible or not. But here’s what I do know: The commitments the federal government has made to retirees, federal employee pensions, the poor, the elderly, the rich people and other nations that owned the government’s debt, treasuries, etc., and everyone else, is now in the $150 trillion range. It is in no way sustainable; it is in no way fundable. And, as Murray noted in the column, no matter how much people like me will fight to bring back jobs – and I have for over 20 years – there are going to be even more sectors that disappear or are going to be shipped off to the billions and billions of people around the world who don’t have our standard of living. In other words, our kids and their kids are doomed.
The society can’t finance the present or the future and more upheaval is coming. It’s time to take a look at this.
