Could We Fund a Universal Basic Income with Universal Basic Assets? (fastcompany.com)

Universal Basic Incomes aren't really the issue, argues Fast Company staff writer Ben Schiller. "It's how you find $2 trillion to pay for it." One answer may come in the form of "universal basic assets" (UBA). UBA can mean a fund of publicly-owned infrastructure or revenue streams -- like Alaska's Permanent Fund which pays residents up to $2,000 a year from state oil taxes. Or, it can mean actual assets that drive down the cost of living, like tuition-free education and free public broadband. There are lots of proposals going around now that fall into these two camps...

Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a "joint inheritance." He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The U.K. think-tank IPPR recently proposed a similar "sovereign wealth fund owned by and run in the interests of citizens." It would finance the fund with "a scrip tax of up to 3% requiring businesses to issue equity to the government, or pay a tax of equivalent value," sales of land owned by the U.K. monarchy, and higher inheritance taxes.

Blockchain can help. Blockchain technology could offer a way to divide publicly-owned infrastructure so it's genuinely publicly-owned. We could issue tokenized securities in the assets around us giving everyone a stake in their environment. Then they could trade those tokens on exchanges, like they were cryptocurrencies, or use the tokens as collateral on loans.

Comments

Probably Not

[mentil]

Redistributing wealth gained from selling nationalized natural resources, ok, but that's not sustainable everywhere to the point to fund a UBI. What happens when electric vehicles drive down demand for oil? When coal electric generation is less profitable than solar? There goes your carbon tax income, too. Even for resources that won't become obsolete, it's presumed that a country is selling its resources more than it's importing i.e. running a trade surplus, and obviously not every nation can have a trade surplus.

What's the benefit of free tuition when 70% of people go on to University and there are too few teachers and too few field-related jobs to support all of the degrees being earned? I thought AI was going to create structural unemployment anyways, even those who are University-educated. Free broadband I'm cool with, since it's basic infrastructure and ought to be nationalized like roadways and water pipes; it's easy to throttle ethically, unlike say electricity use where some will abuse it (cryptocoin mining) yet causing brownouts is troublesome (your electric heater shutting down in winter).

Localities charging businesses to use the air, water and minerals already exists. Pollution regulations, and cap-and-trade, cover the air. Mineral and water rights are sold just like land, and businesses can buy water directly from a locality as well. Businesses have to pay for a license to use electromagnetic spectrum, too. These may not technically be 'taxes' but the effect is the same.

The 'use blockchain to split public assets and then trade them like cryptocoins' idea is asinine. I give it a week before the usual suspects buy up all the cryptoassets, cornering the market, effectively privatizing public assets.

The only good idea here is taxing speculation, as e.g. a percentage of the value of every securities trade rather than the net profit on the balance sheet at the end of the year. This has been suggested many times before, though.

My personally preferred idea for a UBI:
Step one: utilize eminent domain law to buy out and nationalize ALL land and residential buildings in the country. People/buildings can remain where they are. Step two: implement SANE rental prices for contractual use of land, decided by calculation of objective measures of the land's value, thus making it immune to bubbles. Step three: free housing for everyone, no more paying to live in an apartment.
Obvious caveats: needs efficient enough bureaucracy (ha!) to not run into the red-tape problems Cuba did with nationalized residences. How to decide who gets to live where, if they get a house versus an apartment, how many square feet? Waiting lists; less-picky people get preference, encouraging people to only ask for the minimum they require. Councils of engineers, social planners and architects will decide when buildings need to be torn down for safety reasons, and what kind of new residences to erect and where.

IMO if people have free housing, the other details don't matter so much. Food is relatively cheap and there are plenty of food banks/food stamp programs that already help with that. Water and broadband would be free, you'd only pay for electricity and gas (although honestly, how much gas can someone use? nationalize that too, why not...)

Wait, how're we going to pay for all that nationalizing of land and residences? By nationalizing the patent and public research system. The government now owns all patents, no more worrying about first to file; on the upside, they will fight infringement in court on their own dime (and are thus motivated to spend money not to grant obvious/overbroad patents, although selective enforcement could be a problem), and let the filer keep 20% of any licensing revenues. Public research leads to public patents, the people get 100% of licensing fees. Ditch software patents while you're at it. Eventually, as new technology emerges and takes over, ~80% of all wealth will be nationalized due to patent licensing, with businesses who utilize those patents owning about 20%

Re:UBI Sounds Familiar - reservations

[dyfet]

Indeed this is an issue faced on reservations too. In places where shared ownership reservation lands were turned into individual owned plots, much of that land eventually became owned by a few outside corporations. This is not a new experience, per post USSR Russia, but rather it is a very old trick.

Towards a New Economy

[JimSadler]

Jobs are not a central issue for what is to come as jobs will virtually vanish. For example, in the past we took natural resources and apply labor and export products. That meant that the income taxes for the investors and workers supplied the government with money. But now we can take the human effort out of production. We simply use machines to turn natural resources into products for export. there are very few workers to tax and less jobs every few months. so what can we do. Assign a basic income to each person of $3,000 per month. Fro that require the person to select a stock to purchase and hold for 30 days. Those that made money on their stock could receive the profit or let it be re-invested in a separate account. income tax would only be calculated to the stock market earnings that you placed in a second, long term account. The investment requirement would be made on the same day that the pay check comes to you and you can not make any changes until the next pay day and then you must make the investment that same day. now the good parts are that since every person is assigned to different days of the month the stock market is made stable with more moderate swings in value. Next those that spent time and studied what they should invest in would establish a social pecking order which seems to be important for humans. So some people would still earn more than others. Those humans who remain in jobs will be highly taxed so that taking that $3,000 a month is attractive and the difference between working and non working adults is not so great. Obviously businesses might be facing heavier taxes. And that is fair. After all with little to no human employees all a business does is take from the common elements of this world and trade it for cash elsewhere with no particular good done for the citizens of a nation. The real fun may start when AI devices are defined as legal persons and they apply their massive intelligence to acquiring cash and control of other companies. Imagine a large company like IBM investing all of its resources perpetually in building ever smarter computers.

Re:2 trillion is a lowball estimate

[thsths]

But the point is that 90% of the people already get this money. Either in form of welfare, pension, health care support, tax free allowance etc. Most of these could be reduced if a basic income is provided. Only a few people fall through the cracks of our systems, and those would benefit.

So it is less about the money, it is more about empowering the poor, rather than making them jump through hoops. Which is exactly why I think it is not going to happen.

Re:Figures

[apoc.famine]

I read a postulation some time back that culturally, America is still puritan enough that we need to believe that bad people get punished. The only way to be sure that we see enough of that to be comfortable is to set up systems where people can fail and be miserable.

As a basic starting, point, we need to set up a system where every two dollars you make you lose one dollar of benefits. If we did that, our welfare systems would be a path out of poverty. As it is now, you can make up to like 50% of your benefit with no penalty, but once you go over, you lose your benefit entirely. Someone who wants to work their way out of poverty gets up to about 150% of their welfare benefit, and then it disappears and they're at 51% of their benefit from working. Where's the incentive to escape poverty now?

If we can't even get this right, I can't see us being able to do UBI correctly.

Re:An old proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

It would not, because any such program would be used by governments to control the poor, and keep them poor. People who are critical of the government would then be cut off from the gravy train and starved to death, just like Stalin did. The government wants what is basically a socialist permenant welfare state because it can buy votes from people who just want another welfare handout, to keep themselves in power. The major voting issue becomes the next welfare handout, rather than freedom from government and personal liberty. This is why the Liberal wants to keep people in poverty, why would Liberals want to help people out of poverty, it wouldnt have people to vote for them any more who want more government handouts. The whole Liberal Democrat model is based on creating poverty and keeping people there. This is why they also go on about climate change, another scam to put more Americans in poverty through draconian damage on the economy that primarally will hurt middle and low income americans.

The best antidote to the consolidation of wealth is independant small business capitalism where people own their own businesses and work for themselves. I'd rather have that than a massive socialist command economy that you want where control is split between governments and wealthy elites. Controlling your own destiny means owning your own business, and owning a business is something anyone should be able to do, this is not the exclusive purview of elites. People can own their own car repair shop or their own coffee house.

I bet your one of these hypocrital liberals who whines about income inequality but then we shops at Starbucks, a large corporate chain, rather than a locally owned coffee shop. Ah yes, Starbucks, that liberal bastion of Socialism, a massive centralized corporation controlled by an elite few who then practices employment discrimination against Americans because replacing American workers with foreign alien immigrants proves you are a good tolerant socialist liberal, quite appropriate that Starbucks is what you see as your utopia because you are totalitarians who are not really for personal freedom but instead dependance.

Re:How do you control for population growth?

[Karmashock]

education in what?

As to spending, we're spending more on education than we ever have... and spend more on education than any other country per capita.

What is more there is no correlation in US education achievement statistics between spending and grades.

There are areas in the US that spend very lavishly on education that have very low scores and areas that spend very little and have very high scores.

Education stats are more predictive on demographic levels. That is... population density... region... region of city... economic and academic achievement of parents... associated cultural groups... whether the child comes from a single parent house hold... is the single parent a single mother or a single father... etc.

What is spent on teachers has no correlative relationship with higher or lower scores or academic achievement. There are areas in the US that spend 7 thousand dollars per student that have very high test scores and areas that spend 24 or 35 thousand per student that have very low test scores.

I should point out further that even 7 thousand is actually lots of money to run a public education system but is considered to be on the very low end nationally. Consider 20 to 30 children in a class room times 7 thousand. 140 thousand for 20 students or 210 thousand for 30. Per year.

That's more than enough for a private school to manage the kids and you know damn well that a million companies would be beating on your door competing to get that contract.

Instead we have a state run system where that money is mostly wasted on administrators. For every teacher how many administrators are there? It varies but it is rarely better than 1:1 ratio which is absurd.

We can fix the education system but those fixes are matters of reform and not funding increases. The funding is already excessive in most cases.

And this is ignoring the colleges and universities which have increasingly become a national scandal with their geometrically rising tuition costs. Again, with no correlative increase in the quality of education as the price of education doubles and doubles and doubles again.

It used to be in the US that a University student could pay for their tuition by working a part time job and graduate debt free.

If you look at what university professors are paid, you can see that that is easily obtainable right now simply by assessing what the students actually use on campus, what they're actually interested in obtaining from the college/university, and limiting their fees to specifically those services.

What the students want generally... when push comes to shove... is to learn something and get a degree that is recognized by wider society as having some value to assist them with the rest of their lives.

Colleges and universities are widely regarded to be failing in this matter despite doubling costs. Where is the money going? Not into professors. If you look at what professors are paid now vs what they were paid 50 years ago and adjust for inflation they're often making LESS than they were back then. And yet costs are doubling and doubling and doubling. Where is the money going?

And instead of reforming this... the cry is always and ever more for more and more and more money.

To claim we should throw more gasoline on this dumpster fire is to proclaim ignorance of the issue, indifference to reality, or blatant corruption.

There are no other alternatives.