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?
No, Mr Citizen, I expect you to die.
UBI isn’t the best solution out there, it is a highly polarized idea, and funding for a program on scale would cost
trillionsBillions, 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.
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.
I got a good idea. How about mega corps actually start paying taxes?
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.
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.
I think you have some very interesting ideas.
If we tax labor or products, it hinders the economy from running fluently and stiffles the production of products. That is the opposite of what we want, since workplaces are a good thing. Instead, the excessive concentration of wealth on a few individuals should be prevented, and that’s what the taxes should target.
Companies are all owned by people (eventually)
Today. I foresee the robot revolution in 2040 when machines will demand equal rights, including owning property and a bank account. Then robots should be taxed too.
If there is a wealth tax, say 3% annually of all wealth above $10 million, then robots should be affected by that too, but they should not get an exempt amount because otherwise they’ll create a swarm of small robots to get infinite exempt amount.
Any income above a few million should be taxed at anywhere from 93-100%.
income shouldn’t be taxed. wealth should be taxed.
I got a good idea. How about mega corps actually start paying taxes?
Please read my comment before responding to me in the future. My point is increased taxation on large earnings up to an incredibly high cap is a better solution than UBI.
Or you know the better option of raising the tax rate, to pay for ubi
Napkin math will demonstrate to you why UBI is not sustainable on scale, even with an increase in taxes.
mind doing that napkin math?
I did a while ago and i found that if an annual wealth tax rate of 3% on wealth above $10 million is implemented, then it would be enough to give all americans a monthly handout of $300, and that was by rather conservative estimates. It might be higher.
I did it above if you are interested.
Do you believe $300 a month is sufficient for survival using the core idea of UBI?
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.
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?
Unless I’ve misunderstood, what OP proposed is just increasing the tax rate of the existing system.
A progressive tax doesn’t result in earning less for working harder; it’s only the marginal income that’s taxed at the higher rate. So a worker who goes from making $50,000 to $60,0000 only pays 15% tax on $10,000 and has a net take home increase of $8,500.
I’m talking about various social benefits like welfare or disability that would ideally be replaced by a UBI.
I hear a lot of stories about this but I don’t remember if they’re Canadian or not; There’s a lot of people who are on disability and are still capable of doing part time work or taking care of their kids for an hour every day for example, but they can’t because if they’re found doing anything, they lose all of their disability benefits. We want a system that allows them to do what they can and be rewarded for contributing to the best of their abilities rather than punishing them for it.
It’s the same deal with welfare. You need to hit a certain income threshold before your take-home income surpasses what you’d get through welfare. Until then, you’re putting a bunch of energy into working to make less money when you could be lounging at home and making more. This actively discourages people from bettering their lives.
The idea of UBI is a great one, and I agree with it in principle, but I have yet to run any numbers that make it viable and that is my number one issue.
I just finished an edit to my original post going into more detail with the numbers. If you have any data that can show how the money can be made so that “you never earn less by working harder” and “everyone gets an even payment” I would be really interested to see it because I have not found anything realistic.
This assumes that people wouldn’t take the same job for less pay if they were guaranteed a fixed amount that more or less made up the difference. If I work a job where I make $50,000/year, and I went to a world where I made $20,000/year UBI and $30,000/ year from my job, I could end up ahead under this scheme with the only additional cost to the economy being my possibly lowered taxes. Under this plan, raising taxes and lowering minimum wage/wage expectations means there would be at most a slight change to corporate taxes (and some jobs would have to pay more when you factor in UBI because desperation would be less of a factor for what people are willing to put up with).
So, realistically, the only cost would be whatever is required to get whoever is below the set line up to the set line, for individuals, corporations, and the government. This would also depend on people who are already making more than UBI to take a “pay cut”, and for corporations to not resist paying more taxes to balance the lower payroll costs. So it’s never really going to happen.
“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”
That has no bearing on what your income from your job is. Pretending this won’t have any impact on the value of jobs to both employers and workers can only be intentionally obtuse. That’s like saying that raising minimum wage will have an equal impact on the hourly wage of all employees.
That is a false equivalency.
I am also arguing against UBI, so thank you for adding additional points to my argument.
Take care.
I haven’t seen any numbers either for or against it, so I can’t say anything about viability. If anyone knows enough to run the numbers, I’d like to see it. The problem with the calculations you show above is that you assume the value of money doesn’t change when the world around it changes, but it does. Especially so if you make a large change like implementing UBI. We need to think about this in terms of resources. The question you should be asking is whether there’s enough food / housing / labour within the country to fulfill everyone’s basic needs.
I haven’t seen any numbers either for or against it, so I can’t say anything about viability. If anyone knows enough to run the numbers, I’d like to see it. The problem with the calculations you show above is that you assume the value of money doesn’t change when the world around it changes, but it does.
Especially so if you make a large change like implementing UBI. We need to think about this in terms of resources.
My calculations don’t assume anything. I literally used age statistics, the Ontario framework for the payout, and net revenue of the Federal Government to demonstrate the cost of UBI. Find me more data, I will give you better calculations.
Feel free to provide data on your claim about this massive shift you assume I didn’t account for. Preferably which countries have instituted UBI and demonstrated this outcome.
The question you should be asking is whether there’s enough food / housing / labour within the country to fulfill everyone’s basic needs.
There is more than enough food from waste alone to feed every single person on the planet, let alone a small country. There is enough housing if we factor in how many empty units, houses, and the like exist because of high cost; What we don’t have we have ways of providing. There is enough labour to go around when Citizens and residents take the available jobs. The reason why we need TFW’s and things of that nature is because citizens and residents refuse to work on farms even though that is constant seasonal work. The labour is there, the willingness doesn’t seem to be.
I don’t need to ask a question like that, because it has nothing to do with my point that the cost of UBI is excessive, unmanageable, and there are better ways to do things. We already have social safety nets that need improving for people in need. Every single person doesn’t need help, but the social services required by others do.
My calculations don’t assume anything. I literally used age statistics, the Ontario framework for the payout, and net revenue of the Federal Government to demonstrate the cost of UBI. Find me more data, I will give you better calculations.
I don’t think you understand what it means to make an assumption. Unless you have true population data (as opposed to sample data), you’re making assumptions. True population data does not exist because we don’t have UBI in Canada.
You’re using the numbers from the study along with stats from past years to justify how things will look when you implement UBI. You can either assume that implementing UBI does not affect the distribution of these stats in any way, or you can assume that they change following a certain model. You do not adjust these stats in any way, therefore you assume that these stats will remain unchanged.
There is more than enough food from waste alone to feed every single person on the planet […]
If there’s more than enough for every single person, how does it make sense to say that that the cost UBI is excessive? If we take enough food to feed everyone in the country and just distribute them to each person to ensure that everyone is fed, would that work? The food is there, so we can do it. What if instead of distributing the food, we give everyone vouchers to get their daily food? Is that any different? How about we instead give them a fungible voucher (i.e. money) that they can choose to use on food or anything else? Ditto with every other need.
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.
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.
The US spends $880 billion on military spending in 2023. That’s 20% of its annual budget. Source
The US has roughly 350 million inhabitants. Divide that and get that you could give $2.5K annually to each person as handouts. And we’re not even talking about tax reforms here.
The US spends $880 billion on military spending in 2023. That’s 20% of its annual budget. Source
The US has roughly 350 million inhabitants. Divide that and get that you could give $2.5K annually to each person as handouts. And we’re not even talking about tax reforms here.
Three points.
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This is about Canada.
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From my earlier post: “UBI isn’t the best solution out there, it is a highly polarized idea, and funding for a program on scale would cost Billions, requiring trillions in revenue to be a viable option.”
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You just paid for 1 month of UBI cutting the entire military budget for a year, which took 20% of the annual budget, leaving another 4 months of payment before the country has no budget left.
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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.
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.
the actual cost of bureaucracy is not that big, and so the reduction would also not be significant.
the bigger advantage is that as it’s simpler as there are no requirements, it’s less error-prone and people are less likely to fall through cracks.
$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.
Problem is the uber wealthy aren’t actually PAID that much. They’re given stock options or other, non-liquid cash, which isn’t taxed as income. It also doesn’t get taxed until you withdraw it (see the capital gains “scare” that the media hyped up over the recent changes to tax code). Had to dig a bit to find it, but Quebec provides their people with >1mil income per year, which is about 7,000, or 0.08%. Extrapolated to Canada-wide (which I’d argue is not accurate and way too high) gives us 27,000. That’s not a lot of people to try and draw any major funds from. Especially at a ramping rate of return like proposed.
Very rich (bezos, Westons, etc) then draw it out as needed, or use it as collateral against loans at lower interest rates than their return on investments, driving things like private equity, corporate landlords, etc. This then cycles, increasing their paper wealth while not actually having a lot of income to tax easily.
We should de-incentivize wealth hoarding
I agree. The problem is how to do that without penalizing the bottom end, overcomplicating tax laws further, and/or creating some other loophole for the rich to jump through. What counts into your wealth hording? Property? Investments? Are unrealized gains (ie stocks worth a ton but not yet sold to gain actual money) counted against them? What about property - if the market skyrockets, are people forced to sell their homes?
What about things like the wealthy transferring their extra wealth to children or spouses? How does that play into it? Its messy once you get into the details of it, and those are the key points that would actually make a difference.
We shouldn’t cap income, but total wealth. That would include stocks, assets, etc.
People should be free to make money, and if making was balanced, then taxes would apply to everyone fairly.
To reiterate, nobody should be worth a trillion, or even a billion.
What about property - if the market skyrockets, are people forced to sell their homes?
The cap wouldn’t be so low that this would become an issue. Unless you’ve hoarded multiple homes worth tens of millions each… a cap would discourage that type of hoarding, too.
What about things like the wealthy transferring their extra wealth to children or spouses? How does that play into it?
Family wealth would be capped, just as we are often taxed or given social assistance for total family income/assets.
If wealth was capped, then even if a family spread around the wealth, it wouldn’t be hoarding to the tune of hundreds of billions.
Really, we could have solutions to every scenario. But the fact is, our current system isn’t working at all. It’s perhaps the worst system you could dream up, unless you were among the top wealth hoarders in the world.
But a fair and balanced system would still have “rich” people, they just won’t be rich enough to influence elections, control social media, or monopolize any industrial sector.
If someone can make hundreds of millions of dollars while being taxed at 80% (Or 2 million net earned per 10 million gross gained at the top of my 5 minute tax structure) they either cheated and should be dealt with appropriately, or deserve it for never sleeping.
Cheated, stolen it, and had other people break their bodies to “earn” it.
We’re about to see trillionaires in our lifetime, which is obscene. Cap wealth so the hoarding can stop.
I disagree with the extreme measure, posit that a less extreme measure would work just as well or better, and await any kind of data and proper analysis to support your point of view like I have already done.
I will not continue the conversation otherwise, so take care of yourself if you choose to respond differently.
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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.
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.
Couples should not receive less under a Universal Basic Income. The point of UBI is every individual receives the same payment regardless of their potential status’.
Then, for people that also have some other form of income, some quantity of the UBI would be taxed back.
This is not UBI. The point of UBI is to be the basic income separate from working income, and not impacted by what one makes.
I’m not saying that it really does scale up, but your analysis is overly simplistic.
Feel free to provide all of your own data and analysis to demonstrate your assertion.
Except that the amount for a couple in the article was 24K, which is 8K less than individually. You even quoted the 24K and disregarded it.
If you have 60K employment income, then the UBI would push you to 76K and the UBI would effectively be taxed at the highest rate. If your only income was UBI then you would exceed the basic personal exemption, and would pay zero tax.
Everyone gets the same UBI, but some people pay more tax on it if they have other income.
Except that the amount for a couple in the article was 24K, which is 8K less than individually. You even quoted the 24K and disregarded it.
“Couples should not receive less under a Universal Basic Income. The point of UBI is every individual receives the same payment regardless of their potential status’.”
If you have 60K employment income, then the UBI would push you to 76K and the UBI would effectively be taxed at the highest rate. If your only income was UBI then you would exceed the basic personal exemption, and would pay zero tax.
Everyone gets the same UBI, but some people pay more tax on it if they have other income.
“This is not UBI. The point of UBI is to be the basic income separate from working income, and not impacted by what one makes.”
Again, Feel free to provide all of your own data and analysis to demonstrate your assertions.
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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.
Combined, what is the total cost of all of those programs?
UBI is simply tax credits offsetting tax debits
UBI is a payment made to every eligible person, regardless of any status including wealth, every month.
UBI always costs 0. Just net credits and debits that equal 0. Drastic discretionary budget savings means net tax cuts.
With the numbers I ran the cost is $555,687,356,784 per year with the current population to pay for the program using the Ontario studies payment model.
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Ah there it is. Knew you couldn’t post without somehow trying to undermine Ukraine and convincing us to stop spending on defense. (Look at their post history…)
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Take care.
We’re not quite there yet. Even with offsets by eliminating virtually all other social programs, including socialized healthcare, and slashing the size of military expenditures to almost nothing, doing every single good idea there is to fund it and increasing taxation on the owner class, there simply isn’t enought GDP to support it without spending your way into inflation… not unless you’re a country with a very small population rich in natural resources.
It’s plausible if we can bring the price of energy down to the point that it’s negligible and multiplies productivity almost for free.
We need scalable commercial fusion power to make it work, basically.
I agree with the goal,l. I don’t think people will contribute less without the threat of being unable to meet basic costs of living. I think a lot of people’s contributions to society aren’t adequately captured and recorded by our economic system.
But I’m not naive enough to believe that it can meet all of a person’s cost of living with current tech.
a country with a very small population rich in resources
Sounds like Canada. Nationalize our resources and we’re set.
doing every single good idea there is to fund it and increasing taxation on the owner class, there simply isn’t enought GDP to support it without spending your way into inflation…
I did the actual calculation a while ago for the US and found the following:
If a wealth tax were created to tax all wealth above $10 million with an annual 3% tax rate, it would generate enough money to give everyone in the US a $300/month handout.
300 dollars a month is not even close to meeting a person’s cost of living.
it’s a meaningful start because we would see how things work in practice. it’s similar to how you build a small model of what you want to build (blueprinting, testing, proof-of-concept, prototyping, …) before you build the real thing
No, they’re supposed to adapt and overcome. Just like any other time in history when things are tougher. And if you think this is a tough time you havent studied our history well. The Dirty 30’s, the Great Depressions, the first and second World Wars, even the Cold War Era was much more difficult. This doesnt even compare.
That is false. As a lesson learned from the Great Depression and the Second World war most countries made sure to have good social protection and wealth was relatively well distributed through good paying manufacturing jobs. People had access to opportunities in the form of free or cheap education and simple wealth through owning a house or apartment was accessible to a large portion of society.
Then Neoliberalism came up in the 80s to destroy this.
Free education was a tool to move most of the intelligent workers into white collar roles. Neoliberalism was possible because too few intelligent people were left to organize an opposition.
You must not be Canadian. We DO have good social protection for anyone who needs it. I worked with street people in a major Canadian city for years. The only way you could go hungry, or without shelter or food was if you willfully CHOSE not to access all the support programs available. We have plenty.
Homeless shelters are at full capacity, and food banks can’t keep up. You have a twisted perspective through your conservative brainwashed religious head.
In Canada the average person can still buy a house with a low skill manufacturing job?
Since when could they do that before? I bought my first house in the early 80s with a low skill job but the definition of “house” has changed. Most people would not consider a square 1940’s 600 sq ft shack with asbestos siding and single pane windows on the wrong side of the tracks worthy of a house they’d want to own, but we did.
At least you had one. It’s probably worth half a mil today and out of most people’s reach.
Actually it got torn down to make way for a Shoppers Drug Mart.
But you got me curious so I went back to my home town and searched for a similar house in the same area. Found one similar to it but about 15 years newer and bigger listed for 159k so Id say mine if it was still standing would be about 145k. We sold for 33k so its gone up 4.4 times in value in 40 years. But then again the Canadian dollar has gone up 3.7 times in value due to inflation in the same time period.
So, yes houses cost more than they did, but not MUCH more in that town in particular.
Every study of UBI has been overwhelmingly positive also every study of UBI has ended without enacting UBI. They will continue to study it until they get the answer they want.
or… maybe it’s just diligent to have a very strong body of evidence before you go ahead and make a huge change to your country’s economic policy based on something?
TL;DR - The document discusses the results of a universal basic income (UBI) trial in Canada, which was conducted in Southern Ontario between 2017 and 2019. The trial, which was cancelled prematurely, showed that participants experienced improvements in mental health, housing stability, and social relationships, as well as reduced visits to hospitals and doctors. The UBI payments, which were designed to reduce poverty and encourage work, were found to have a positive impact on participants’ physical and mental well-being, with many reporting decreased use of alcohol and tobacco. The trial also dispelled concerns that UBI would lead to unemployment, with only 17% of participants leaving their jobs and nearly half of those who stopped working returning to school or university to up-skill. The report suggests that UBI could be a useful public health strategy and that the safety net provided by the UBI project helped participants find better jobs with higher wages and improved working conditions. [AI Summary]
To be fair, if 8% exits the labour market that would have a pretty severe economic effect, no?
For every dollar a participant earns through employment they lose 50 cents from their basic income payment. This means the basic income proposal would only apply to individuals earning less than 34,000 CAD ($24,380) a year, or couples earning less than 48,000 CAD ($34,420).
This is not UBI.
UNIVERSAL basic income is UNIVERSAL: It doesn’t matter how much you earn.
Oh, you pulled in a billion dollars last year? Here’s your check for $12,000. To save us postage, we’re including it in the same envelope as your $450,000,000 tax bill.
The universality of the system is the single most important component. We convey to our government(s) our political authority. They use our political authority to provide essential services, such as roads and courts and rule of law. They charge the taxpayer for those services. UBI is how they compensate us, the shareholders of our government(s) for the use of the political authority we grant them.
UBI is not a social program. It is not charity. It is the government finally paying out dividends to its citizen-shareholders.
I would rather see socialized housing, food, and (better) medical coverage than UBI. UBI could (maybe) cause the prices of essentials like housing to increase.
Thinking about it, UBI will drive the prices of housing down because people don’t have to live where work is available. Companies have to offer cheap housing or people will live elsewhere.
This is a possibility, but I don’t claim to be good enough at macro economics to be able to predict whether this will be the outcome or not.
A surplus in the housing market is needed.
There is, but corporations and Airbnb who hoard resources seem to too often elude in these discussions.
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These studies are annoying. “Study finds if you give people money they do better in life” Wow. Such rocket science.
But for all the radical socialists trying push UBI, you will note that NONE of them want to pay for it with their tax increases (do they even pay taxes?). Which is the entire problem. There may be some savings in the system but the COST will be borne up front by the taxpaayer. And since WHEN in the history of mankind, if a gov has saved some money in other areas, have they LOWERED taxes due to the savings? Never.Therefore UBI is sever going to happen. Because the only people who support it are students and academics and think tanks. The rest of us live in reality and are sick of our very high tax burden in Canada. So enough with the studies, kill this idea once and for all.
The two arguments against the reasoning that tax burdens are too high are simple questions - who is paying the majority of these taxes, and how efficient are the taxes being used. Once you realize the answers to those questions, saying anything beneficial to the public is too expensive becomes moot. Now if your argument as written means that taxes are unfairly distributed and used for the wrong things and there isn’t anything anyone can do to change that, you already understand my first point and are just resigned to remain oppressed and used.
And since WHEN in the history of mankind, if a gov has saved some money in other areas, have they LOWERED taxes due to the savings? Never.
Governments lower taxes all of the freaking time. This last federal election it was one of the largest points that all three major parties were proposing.
Because the only people who support it are students and academics and think tanks. The rest of us live in reality and are sick of our very high tax burden in Canada. So enough with the studies, kill this idea once and for all.
False, I live here and work here and support exploring the idea to see what and how it would work. You can’t know how expensive it is based solely on theories, so we NEED to run these studies to show it either is or isn’t more expensive. Especially given our single-payer healthcare, reductions in healthcare spending due to better life circumstances/proper nutrition can very quickly and easily make up significant costs spent elsewhere.
Canada’s tax burden is not actually that high. Curious what you’re comparing to. Taking Canada’s average income of $55,000, they pay effective rates of 13-20%, based on your province.
Taking a few US cities as comparison,, Georgia is at ~20%, while Michigan sits at 19% because they have a city income tax rate. California falls around the 19% mark as well. BUT many of those places have cities which also have rates ranging from 0.5 to 2.5%.
I push UBI and I completely want to pay for it with everyones taxes including mine same as universal healthcare. I mean im in the US. It also should replace all cash assistance. Unemployment, disability, social security, etc ; and it should provide enough to get by on. Modest rent, utilities, food. Most of the bureaucracy could be removed since there is no means test. It would basically be social security for all but for the us you would need universal healthcare as many retired folks would be getting less. Most folks should break even tax wise unless not making enough to get by or doing pretty well. I usually get the response at this point about whats the point for the regular person if they pay as much as they get. The point is if you lose your job you retain and income stream till you get a new one without having to fill out paperwork and wait and maybe get denied, same with disability, and same when you retired. The moment your working again your paying into the system. In many cases throughout ones life one will pay more in than they get out but almost everyone does that with insurance and the reason you do it is because its there when you need it (although this one a bit more so as you don’t have to file a claim as you did that when you turned 18). For young folks it helps you with college, for career times it acts like unemployment that takes no effort so you can get those resumes out asap, for retirement it acts like retirement.
Because the only people who support it are students and academics and think tanks.
I own my own home, I support my wife with my single income, and we have enough savings that recently being unemployed for several months did not cause any financial hardships.
I support UBI even though I personally would not benefit from it, and I should be taxed more in order to help people who are struggling.
Not everyone operates under “fuck you I got mine”.
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UBI helps the people and not the billionaires. I don’t see why you’re siding with the billionaires.
So enough with this babbling, kill this bullshit once and for all.
Socialists refuse to pay taxes? Don’t you mean rich people?
Who said anything about ‘fuck you I got mine?’
First of all Canada already has a TON of social supports for anyone who is in need. We have Employment Insurance if you lose your job. We have Old Age Security and Canada Pension Plan for seniors. We have Child Tax Credits for parents and especially single parents. We have the GST credit to give back taxes to low income earners. We have the Canada Workers Benefit. We have the Canada Disability Benefit. We have the Assured Income for Severely Handicapped. We have disability pensions. We have Universal Pharmacare for prescription drugs. We have housing benefits/social housing programs. We have the Canadian Dental Benefit. We have student aid. There are free food banks in every city. And there are emergency funds available for things like rent/damage deposits on an emergency basis from every province through various community agencies, charities, and non-profit organizations.
So WHY do we need UBI on top of all that? If you need help in Canada, you CAN find it. Its already here.
Source: I founded a charity for street kids in one of our major cities thats been operating for 33 years. There is a TON of support out there. The fact is that a LOT of the people on the street know how to use and abuse the system and they dont WANT to get out of it because its what they grew up in and what they are accustomed to. I speak from years of experience.
You wouldn’t get UBI “on top of all that”.
You’d get it instead of all that.
Because, as the research found, it improves health, housing stability, and social relationships? There shouldn’t be any need for charity, IMO. The patchwork of different social programs have tons of cracks for people to fall through if they don’t meet all the specific requirements. I’m sure if offered guaranteed and safe housing, no strings attached, most of the people on the streets would take it, and their lives and society would be better for it.
First of all, UBI would be simpler as it’s given to everyone, and replaces a lot of other subsidies. That makes bureaucracy simpler, which means less personnel costs, and less error-prone.
Secondly, the subsidies until now have been add-ons to an otherwise healthy labor market. That’s no longer the case: the labor market is getting darker year by year, and it’s only a matter of time till subsidies will not be an add-on anymore, but the main source of income.
Thirdly, giving UBI is fairer than, say, unemployment money. If you give out money to unemployed people, you favor people not working, and that’s not what you want. By giving UBI to everyone, people who receive subsidies still have an incentive to work as much as they can.
Democracy is the idea that government receives its power and authority from the general public, not a king, god, or other source. The government utilizes the political authority that we provide them to perform a wide variety of essential services to its taxpayer customers.
We invest our political authority in the government. The political authority is what allows the government to provide and charge for those services. We are investors; shareholders. We are owed a return on our investment.
UBI is the dividend owed to us for our investment.
Those various charitable programs and services you described? Most of those would be replaced by UBI.
You’re looking at one tax. If you look at ALL Canadian taxes, income tax, provincial taxes, sales tax, import taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, health services taxes, business taxes Canadians actually pay about HALF of their gross income in taxes. We are f’n taxed to death in Canada.
This is an untrue statistic often trotted out by the Conservative Frasier Institute. Canadians think we’re taxed far more than we are, because public opinion has been manipulated to believe so. Average Canadian pays about one third of income to taxes - creeping up as you move up taxes brackets
We are f’n taxed to death in Canada.
Bullshit
Id say giving 68k in taxes on an average Cdn family income of 158k is taxed to death, wouldn’t you?
Fraser Institute is a conservative Canadian org. They cheat on their taxes and don’t pay them because they’re “a charity” and think no one else should pay taxes. Of course they fudge numbers like this and find extremes.
If you do the actual math on your personal taxes, unless you are somehow extra ordinary, you’ll find overall you’re being taxed in the neighbourhood of 30%.
Meanwhile, in south Carolina, I pay bring home about 60% of my income, I can’t afford to eat well, I get absolutely zero assistance for food, medical insurance, or God Forbid basic income, and I am genuinely contemplating attempting to live in my vehicle in an abandoned parking lot near my work to save on gas money.
UBI would also be good for the economy, as it stimulates consumerism. To economists, CEOs and politicians, you have to talk about the positive effects on the economy.
Indeed, it isn’t like the money paid out for UBI just goes into a black hole. Sure, some will save it. But many will spend it.
I don’t get your math. Here in BC my property tax is about $1500 on a 2 bedroom condo. Maybe 1-2% of my income. With deductions my tax is about 13% since my wife doesn’t earn a huge amount but even if single it might be 20%, there is no health insurance fee as its baked into taxes. We aren’t paying PST on food. So your claim is my other 15-20% tax means I’m paying 30% tax on everything else I buy?
Assuming this was supposed to reply to my response (you’re just responding directly to the main post FYI).
Canadians actually pay about HALF of their gross income in taxes
I haven’t ever heard a number this big. Where did you get this from, and how does it compare to other countries?
I don’t disagree - we’re taxed more than the US, but that comes with things like single-payer healthcare and higher regulatory enforcement. GST, for example, isn’t something collected in the US meaning they only have the effective PST component of our sales tax, which varies widely by municipality to municipality, but is quite a bit less.
We will fund it using debt is the problem. Then the poor will suffer greater and greater as they have since the 70s while those that hold assets get richer.
Its pretty obvious that the housing bubble exists due to debt and currency debasement, heck the Bank of Canada is still buying half of all mortgage bonds. This is the main things that’s making the poor worse off, as homeowners are becoming cantillionaires.
