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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 190 points 1 week ago

It's a crime to not have universal basic income at this point. People aren't only unable to afford basic living expenses, but they're losing jobs to automation and AI already. What are these people supposed to do? Go beg on the streets?

[-] [email protected] 53 points 1 week ago

No, Mr Citizen, I expect you to die.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

Idk, I feel like landlords would just jack prices by whatever the ubi payments are. Ubi is a good idea for sure, but it's only a piece.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago

Controlled rent would also be fantastic and has worked in economically diffuclt times like COVID. I don't see why it wouldn't work again during the recession we are spiralling towards.

[-] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

City-owned housing works great here in Vienna. The City owns like somthing like 20% of all apartments and rents them out at basically non-profit rates. It works fantastically! It does not only offer lower rents, but it makes people realize that landlords often charge unnecessarily high prices and makes people demand better from landlords, so these lower their prices as well to compete with the city apartments.

Edit: for reference, i'm paying 500€/month (roughly $600/month) on rent and it's already a private-owned apartment. In the city apartments, the rent is even lower still.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Controlled rent is better than uncontrolled rent, but it suffers from the same problems as minimum wage. And why should landlords even exist? I'm not convinced private rentals should be legal at all. If you're not using a property for personal use or a place of business, why shouldn't it be seized and auctioned or rented publicly?

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Explain to me why landlords didn't just jack rent payments in 1960s. Why did people back then have money left at the end of the month?

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

UBI isn't the best solution out there, it is a highly polarized idea, and funding for a program on scale would cost ~~trillions~~ Billions, requiring trillions in revenue to be a viable option.

I think a better idea is a reform of taxation.

First $50,000 of income is not taxed.

$50,001-$100,000: Taxed at 15% $100,001-$500,000: Taxed at 25% $500,001-$1,000,000: Taxed at 40% $1,000,000-$10,000,000: Taxed at 50%

$10,000,001+: Taxes increase by 10% per $10,000,000 earned to a cap of 80%

This would essentially create the conditions of UBI, help to increase funding for support for those who cannot work or are unable to work full time, and the rich finally get to pay their share.

These are also really rough numbers just as an example for the idea.

Edit:

For those who do not believe that UBI is unsustainable on scale:

The idea of UBI: "Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a social welfare concept that proposes providing all citizens or residents of a particular country or region with a regular, unconditional sum of money, regardless of their income, employment status, or wealth"

There are 32,708,656 Canadians as of 2024 aged 20 or older according to population estimates.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000501

The 2023-2024 total revenues for Canada was $459.5 billion.

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/services/publications/annual-financial-report/2024.html#a9

The article cites the experiment where the participants received either $16,989 CAD/year as a single person or $24,027 CAD/year. UBI is supposed to be the same payment regardless of any status, so I am going to use the single person amount for scale.

32,708,656 * $16,989 = $555,687,356,784

$555,687,356,784 - $459,500,000,000 = $96,187,356,784

Canada would need to make almost $100 billion more in revenue every year just to cover UBI, and that does not include anything else Federal revenue is used for.

UBI is not sustainable on scale, and there are better options.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago

I got a good idea. How about mega corps actually start paying taxes?

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Taxing corps is the same as taxing people, there's no difference other than whos books it ends up on. Companies are all owned by people (eventually)

If you want to tax wealthy people who hold the stocks, tax them directly.

Let the companies generate value free from taxes on their operation. Of course we should charge them taxes for things like land and resource use, and force them to meet human, environmental, and safety standards.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

I like this better. It means fully worker owned corporations get to keep more of their earnings because it's more spread out. Discourages wealth concentration.

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[-] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

UBI helps the most at need the most. Taxation reduction requires income.

Every successful social programme requires the proper taxation of rich bastards. That's a history thing.

If you can't figure that out, I don't need to read the rest. We do not applaud the tenor if he can't clear his throat.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

Ubi is just a reform of progressive taxation so that it goes slightly negative as you get closer to zero income instead of stopping at zero percent.

[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

Also most of the studies of ubi show it doesn’t cost all that much because it allows a reduction in expensive to administer social programs - obviously less of an effect in the USA that doesn’t have those.

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[-] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

In my opinion, the main appeal of UBI over other forms of support is that

  • the absence of means testing ensures no one falls through the cracks, and
  • you never earn less by working harder.

That's not to say that you can't design a support system that doesn't have these issues, but with UBI, they're just trivially non-existent. No need for extra work in figuring out how to fix these problems.

I don't see how funding would be an issue unless you count the savings from letting people fall through the cracks. Shouldn't it cost the same to effectively support people in need regardless of how you distribute the money?

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

the lenghts people will go to keep capitalism.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

$10,000,001+: Taxes increase by 10% per $10,000,000 earned to a cap of 80%

You are too kind.

Because wealth hoarders would still make HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS, even if you taxed 80%.

The tax rate should be 100% past a certain amount of wealth. We should de-incentivize wealth hoarding, and encourage people to retire once they've made enough to sustain their family for a lifetime. If they choose to keep working, it should basically be volunteer work after a certain point, and wealth should be redistributed back to everyone else.

If we put a hard cap on wealth, everyone would be in a position to retire young and not struggle through their entire life. This is what we should be striving for.

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Canada would need to make almost $100 billion more in revenue every year just to cover UBI, and that does not include anything else Federal revenue is used for.

UBI means a net tax reduction, with clear quality of life improvements, as long as the obvious social spending programs are eliminated. The higher the UBI, the more programs are obvious elimination candidates. UBI is simply tax credits offsetting tax debits. As obvious examples, the basic tax exemption means rates above the exemption need to be higher to raise the same revenue as if there were no basic exemption. When investment income gets tax breaks and no payroll taxes, employment and business income needs to be taxed higher for same revenue. Lower business income tax rate? = higher employment taxes.

UBI always costs 0. Just net credits and debits that equal 0. Drastic discretionary budget savings means net tax cuts.

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[-] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

If you did work in some reasonable proportion of married couples, it might get close to break even. Then remember that CPP, OAS and EI all disappear, and whatever funds they have would contribute to UBI. CPP at max draw by itself is almost as much UBI.

Then, for people that also have some other form of income, some quantity of the UBI would be taxed back.

I'm not saying that it really does scale up, but your analysis is overly simplistic.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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