Tag: UBI

Leftists admit Socialism is unaffordable

“The democratic socialists may do well in November.  Yet upon arriving in Washington, they will discover that even their revolution cannot repeal the laws of math.”  That is how an article with Vox by Brian Riedl ends.  Riedl uses leftist and Democrat sources to compile the costs of the Democratic Socialist agenda and finds that even the most generous sources leave them with $3.4 trillion per year to make up in tax revenues.

Democrats have gained traction in the coming election by claiming that deficits are bad and we need to tax the rich to fix it.  But don’t mistake their feigned concern for actual fiscal sanity.  Even the extensive list of new taxes laid out by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t cover 10% of the cost of their agenda.

According to Reidl, Democratic Socialists could pay for all the free stuff they are promising with a 100% tax on all corporations and 100% tax on all family income over $150,000 for married taxpayers and $90,000 for singles.  This would be on top of the current tax structure and assumes the willingness of business owners and capital providers to devote their hard work to charity rather than profit.  Another idea to add on to our current taxes would an 87% value added tax.  Basically, in every step of the manufacturing process, the government gets 87 cents of every dollar made.  The inflation would kill the middle class.  Lastly, we could do it if we added a 37% flat payroll tax on top of the current tax structure.  For the middle class this would mean an all in tax rate of 77%.

So let’s talk about this blue wave?  Are voters really ready to kill the economic growth by ending the Trump tax cuts?  Are they really ready to hand over their healthcare decisions in exchange for giving 77 cents of every dollar they make to the government?  Is this what people really want?  It’s not like the Left is running on anything else, except for extreme Trump hate.  Well, now you have an idea of how much that hatred will cost you just in taxes.

UBI and the Matrix

I’ve been asked in the past about my views on UBI, or universal basic income. This article does a pretty good job of summing up how UBI creates two classes of humanity. I would go further to say UBI takes a large portion of humanity out of the evolutionary process.

When you lose your job to a machine, you are forced to reinvent yourself and find a new way of providing for yourself in a world of limited resources. That’s why businesses are started in garages, why new things are invented, and why people go back and educate themselves in fields that matter to the progress of humanity.

I see it as the Matrix. For younger readers, the Matrix was a movie about a future age where robots have taken over the world and hooked every human into a computer that feeds off of their biomass energy while keeping them satiated with a false virtual reality.

In the Matrix you live in a fake reality, have everything you need, and meanwhile your body slowly is eaten up and decays. Outside of the Matrix life is difficult. You are fighting the very automation that has enslaved the rest of humanity. For a time the food isn’t as good. The living conditions aren’t as good. But you are free, innovative by necessity, and progressing humanity.

We’ve had UBI before. Instead of having a job, we had large populations who lived in provided homes, ate provided food, and performed tasks required by the free class of society. That was slavery. In my mind, UBI equates to slavery because it’s only a matter of time before the working class requires the UBI class to contribute for their government provided paycheck. That will usually come right about the time the Socialists get the difficult reminder that resources are not unlimited.

When the resources to provide UBI run out, the question usually comes down to whether people should be forced into labor camps or systematically starved. Just ask anyone anywhere socialism has actually been tried. When robots figure out how to solve the question of limited resources, then let’s give UBI a shot.