Currently, according to OECD data, the United States spends approximately 20% of GDP on social welfare, so moving to a UBI would represent a 7 percentage point increase.
That’s unlikely to ever be true. That 20% the U.S. government spends on Social Welfare includes both the entire Social Security system and Medicare/Medicaid.
If both programs were disbanded and folded into a UBI system, every person over the age of 65 and every disabled person on SSDI and Medicaid would be significantly worse off. You’re talking about giving them $20K and then taking away their $12K in Social Security and telling them to go fend for themselves for healthcare.
So it is unlikely that both programs would go away at any point in the foreseeable future. That 7% increase is most certainly going to be much, much more than that.
But the question was never over the dollar amount; it’s always been about efficiency and effectiveness.
Well, the dollar amount comes into it when you start taking things away from people. One of the general concepts with implementing UBI is that no one should end up in a position that makes them worse off than they were pre-UBI.
