Yeah.

Many people who are into BI are unwilling to admit its a very expensive proposition that they insist will be fixed with "economic growth". Its the same handwaving the GOP does.

Perfect example:

There are 242,470,820 adults in the US.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

~55% of people make $30k or less and would get the full grant. He proposes b/t 30k and 60k it drops to 50%. So lets just drop it for the other 45% to 7k (instead of $6500) to keep the numbers simple.

($13,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($7,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $2.5 trillion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

The current budget is $3.7 trillion.

Healthcare + Social Security + Nondiscretionary Defense = 937+882+585 (billions) = $2.4 trillion. So you are already roughly at the same budget (despite his argument that isn't the case). Yes, he wants people 18-21 not to have access but that won't work in practice realistically some people get kicked out in this country at age 18 and have access to welfare.

The argument he makes is:

> 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. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.

Despite his age assumption & numbers being borderline unrealistic...

https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...

NHE per capita is ~$9,523. He wants insurance to cost $3,000, even if we magically assume 100% of that goes straight to payments. That extra $6,523 has to come from somewhere for people on Medicaid.

If you get a $13,000 grant, you basically lose (realistically) access to medical care with basic income beyond very basic care. (i.e. If you get cancer, no one will cover it so you die. If you get a possibly deadly chronic disease, you can't afford it, you die.)

http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spendin...

That is worse for Medicare enrollees which is ~$10.3k So they lose ~$7.3k worth of care.

Yes it is cheaper (using his math) but he doesn't explicitly explain the impact.

It pays for itself by:

1) Cutting income for those on social security to ~$1000. ( Realistically, for the elderly, with overhead for private insurance you are spending probably ~$12 for equivalent care)

2) Cutting medical care for those on welfare currently to $0. ( Realistically, you can't pay for the current level of medical care for the average person on this BI. )

3) Food costs will go up without subsidies, which will likely add $240 in annual costs (conservatively).

So its basically cutting Social Security to ~$750/year for the elderly and cutting medical care for those in poverty to the bare essentials. Similarly, at the rate of medical inflation, the "cheaper" is almost entirely sourced from killing Social Security or Medical Care (depending on how you look at it) but it'll get worse (assuming you are adjusting BI on the CPI).

And this is the most concrete article with numbers I could find in like 5 minutes of Googling it.

The rest were all hand wavy.

If you don't kill Medicaid/Medicare on that same proposal, and just reduce the subsidy by $3k:

($10,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($5,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $1.88 trillion

If you drop Medicare/Medicaid the budget they can take the money from is only $1.467 trillion. So now its obvious where the money came from to save those billions.