Eliminate Income Taxes Without Debt Or Inflation? Easy-Peasy.

The ever-insightful Ellen Brown has an excellent article about how to eliminate the income tax (at least on the non-rich) without exploding debt and inflation, and without cutting any services.  But unlike Trump's plan which will replace the lost revenue with questionable tariffs like McKinley did, she proposes something like Abraham Lincoln did instead.  That is, just print the money via the Treasury, no FERAL Reserve needed.  That's similar to what Dr. Joseph M. Firestone calls "Overton Congressional Financing" and what Rodger Malcolm Mitchell calls "Monetary Sovereignty".  It is an idea that is LONG overdue!

Not only could we eliminate the debt and non-rich income tax, but we could also finance so many things like fixing and upgrading our crumbling and outdated infrastructure, world-class education for all, state of the art technology, single-payer Medicare For All, and Universal Basic Income.

What better time than now?

Excellent Article About UBI

The ever-insightful Rodger Malcolm Mitchell has a great new article about the topic of UBI from a Monetary Sovereignty perspective.  Read it and share it far and wide.  It needs to go VIRAL!

The only arguments against UBI are either ignorant, obsolete, greedy, selfish, patronizing, paternalistic, and/or sadistic, which means that there are really NO good arguments against it in any free and decent society worthy of the name.  Period.

(Mic drop)

The Latest Universal Basic Income (UBI) Experiment Study Is A Political-Philosophical Rorschach Test

Much has been made of the latest Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment run by tech CEO Sam Altman, lasting for three years beginning in 2020, and the study of the results by Eva Vivalt et al.  In a nutshell, the abstract below, particularly the text in bold (emphasis ours), seems to be a sort of political and philosophical Rorschach (inkblot) test, in which we all see what we subconsciously want to see:

We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

And there you have it.  Some commenters have reacted positively to it, seeing it as a good thing, and some negatively, seeing it as a bad thing, often quite predictably based on political leanings.  That said, the following comment from a libertarian perspective on the Reason article clearly wins the internet:

check out reddit.com/r/antiwork

There are large groups of people who simply think it’s unfair that they are required to work in order to feed themselves. Why should they be required to do things that society deems “useful”?

I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers.

I’m ok with one of the consequences being that some people can stop pretending to work.

The commenter, Bubba Jones, makes an excellent point there.  So what if UBI results in such a modest drop in work hours and the nominal size of the labor force?  A drop of merely two percentage points and 1.4 hours per week is hardly a mass exodus from the workforce, and I would hazard a guess that the lion's share of the drop is concentrated among those who are at the lower end of the bell curve and the vitality curve, that is, marginally attached workers who tend to enervate more than they energize.  (Note as well that this study was done largely during the outlier years of the pandemic, so that may have biased the numbers.)  And in any case, more leisure is NOT inherently a bad thing.  As Robert Reich famously said, the economy exists to make our lives better, we don't exist to make the economy.   This of course echoes Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative that we should always treat humanity as ends in themselves, and never solely as a means to an end.

And it dovetails nicely with the famous quote by the late, great Buckminster Fuller, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

(Mic drop)

UPDATE:  The ever-insightful Rodger Malcolm Mitchell has a great new article about the topic of UBI from a Monetary Sovereignty perspective.  Read it and share it far and wide.  It needs to go VIRAL!

Also, as the ever-insightful Marco Fioretti notes, the laws of physics ultimately demand some flavor of UBI from a limits-to-growth perspective.  Thus whether you are pro-growth, anti-growth, degrowth, or agnostic about growth, all roads lead to UBI.

And finally, to clarify, the TSAP agrees with the Reddit comment IF the middle part is modified as follows:

"I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for [cash] welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic [comprehensive] healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers."

There, fixed it for you.  And once again:

(Mic drop)

2025 UPDATE:  The Sam Altman study is now no longer the largest UBI study, much less the final word on the matter.  A more recent Los Angeles UBI study that began in 2022, with an even larger number of participants, found that it actually increased full-time employment, and was overall beneficial.  This one gave $1000 per month per household.  Of course, all of the participants in this study either had or were expecting dependent children, unlike the Sam Altman trial which included both parents and non-parents, but even in the latter, the small reduction in work was largely concentrated among younger adults who didn't have kids, who could afford to hold out for better jobs.  Which makes sense, as having kids is quite expensive these days, and while $1000/month certainly helps make ends meet, it is practically impossible for even an individual, let alone a whole family, to live on by itself in California.

A Better Than Nordic-Style Social Welfare State With Less Than ALASKA Taxes

A friendly reminder to all readers:  contrary to popular opinion, it is entirely possible to have a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida Alaska taxes.  Why?  (You really may want to sit down before reading any further.)

Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending, that's why!  Not the individual income tax, not the corporate income tax, not FICA, not the various excises, duties, and tariffs, not estate or gift taxes, nor any other federal tax for that matter.  It is all a Big Lie illusion to prop up the oligarchy, especially the big banks, via artificial scarcity of dollars.  As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell famously notes, and echoed by Dr. Joseph M. Firestone, the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, that is, being the issuer of it's own currency, it by definition has infinite money.  Any money they receive, through taxes or otherwise, is effectively like bringing coals to Newcastle, in that it disappears into infinity (thus de facto destroyed).  And whenever they spend money on anything, they create each dollar on an ad hoc basis to pay as they go.  

Switching to what Dr. Firestone calls "Overt Congressional Financing (OCF)" is LONG overdue.  On August 15, 1971, the gold standard effectively ended for good, but the method of Congressional financing remains more or less stuck in the past.

Meanwhile, the so-called "National Debt" (TM) is also an illusion, in that it consists of Treasury securities that are only spuriously linked to federal spending due to arcane and archaic rules left over from the now-defunct gold standard that ended over half a century ago.  Each T-security is effectively equivalent to a CD savings account for those who choose to invest in them.  Additionally, the idea that money can only be created with interest or other "strings" attached to it is yet another part of the Big Lie as well.

(It could literally be paid off in one fell swoop at zero cost to anyone, in fact.  And it's technically not even "borrowing" at all.  Infinite money, remember?)

Ditto for the Social Security, Medicare, and other federal "trust funds", which are literally nothing more than accounting gimmicks based on artificial scarcity.  They could fund all of that and more by simply creating the money on an ad hoc basis.

As for inflation, that is generally caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by printing too much money.  It is ultimately a supply-side problem that requires supply-side solutions, including (counterintuitively) more federal spending targeted to incentivize more production of scarce goods and services.  Thus, rationing dollars via austerity measures and/or raising interest rates to fight inflation and/or recession is like applying leeches to cure anemia.  It is a fundamental category mistake that does far more harm than good on balance.

Of course, the oligarchs want to condition We the People to accept mere crumbs from the tables of the rich.  That way they can keep widening the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, givng the oligarchs more power to lord it over us all.

Bottom line: all of these gimmicks are completely artificial, contrived, and designed to deceive us all.  The ONLY purposes of taxes in a Monetarily Sovereign government that issues it's own currency (like the federal government, but not (yet) state and local governments) are 1) to control and regulate the economy by encouraging or discouraging various behaviors and activities, 2) to (crudely) fight inflation, 3) to create demand for the currency, and 4) to prop up and give credence to the Big Lie.  But the supposed need to raise revenue is NOT one of them at all.

Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Congress can very easily square the circle of a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Alaska taxes, complete with a national version of the Alaska Permanent Fund.  They gave the FERAL Reserve its power in 1913, and they can just as easily take it away today if they chose to.  But of course, their oligarch masters would NOT want that at all!  Most Congresscritters save for a tiny few, are of course bought and paid for by the big money interests.  Thus, we need to throw the bums out, yesterday!

So what are we waiting for? PAGING DR. FIRESTONE!  NEEDED IN WASHINGTON, DC, STAT!

Objections To Universal Basic Income Debunked (Updated Re-Post)

Back in 2017, there was an article in The Week by Damon Linker titled, "The Spiritual Ruin of a Universal Basic Income".  He basically argues that it is a Very Bad Idea for the left to pursue the idea of a UBI because 1) it fails to address (and perhaps even intensifies) the psychological and spiritual consequences of joblessness, which are (in his view) distinct from and worse than the economic consequences, 2) most people couldn't handle joblessness even with a basic income, and would thus become depressed and purposeless and give themselves over to video games, porn, and/or drug addiction, and 3) the left should not concede that automation (and the resulting job losses) is in any way inevitable.  Because reasons, obviously. 

And all of these things are in fact false.  (Or to be exceedingly charitable, highly subjective at best.)

First, only a person of relative privilege could possibly see the economic consequences of joblessness as somehow entirely separate from, and less significant than, the (admittedly real) psychological and spiritual consequences of same.  The former can indeed cause or contribute to the latter in a big way, and it is very difficult to disentangle them.  Material poverty and desperation are in fact well-known to be objectively harmful to the mind, body, and spirit, and only meaningful work (as opposed to work for the sake of work) can really be said to be beneficial to same.  And when the economic consequences are resolved via a UBI, the remaining noneconomic consequences of unemployment would in fact become that much easier to tackle in practice.  Think about it. 

(Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, hello!  Only when the lower rungs of basic physiological and security needs are satisfied (which UBI does) is it even possible to even partially achieve the higher rungs.)

Second, there is NO logical reason why a UBI and the sort of New Deal 2.0 jobs program that Linker advocates would be mutually exclusive.  The TSAP, in fact, advocates exactly that combination, with both a UBI and a scaled-up Job Corps style program for everyone who wants one (even if not quite a guarantee).  We also advocate shortening the workweek as well, which would spread the remaining work among more workers, thus more jobs.  (The vaunted 40 hour workweek is literally a relic of 1938, and even then was almost going to be set as low as 30 hours.)  Thus, the noneconomic consequences of joblessness can also be adequately dealt with as well, and in any case, one can always choose to do volunteer work (and there most likely will still be plenty of that available) to get the same ostensible psychological and spiritual benefits as paid work.  So that is NOT a valid reason for the left to abandon the idea of UBI, anymore than it would be a reason to abandon the idea of a social safety net in general.

(Actually, John Maynard Keynes, along with many other futurists, predicted that with the increases in productivity due to technology, the average workweek would eventually shrink to 15 hours by the end of the 20th century.  Of course, that didn't happen, since the oligarchs took nearly all the fruits of the productivity gains since the early 1970s, thanks to neoliberalism.)

Third, the idea that UBI will cause most people or even a particularly large chunk of the population to become lazy and/or self-destructive is NOT borne out by the facts.  Numerous experiments with UBI and related schemes have been conducted in diverse cultures and locations in the past half-century, and the overwhelming weight of the evidence to date strongly suggests that this will NOT occur.  If anything, one notable effect is an increase in entrepreneurship due to a decreased fear of failure and more time and money to invest in their goals. Students and new mothers will likely work fewer hours than before since they are no longer forced by dint of economic necessity (the effect on hours worked is likely negligible for everyone else), but is that really such a bad thing?  Of course not.

No serious proposal for UBI has advocated one large enough to "live large" on that alone.  (The most common proposals, including the TSAP's, rarely exceed $1000/month per adult and $500/month per child under 18.)  Thus, there will still be plenty of incentive to work, since unlike traditional means-tested welfare programs, there is no penalty for earning more money than some arbitrary threshold.

In any case, with or without UBI, workers will work, and shirkers will shirk regardless.  Employers may (at first) not be pleased about having to pay somewhat higher wages than before to attract and retain quality employees, but them's the breaks for solving collective action problems.  In other words, it would now have to be entirely by mutual consent, not desperation or coercion.  And ultimately, even the employers themselves will benefit in the long run as well, as Henry Ford famously noted long ago.

(If we really want to incentivize work in the event of a labor shortage, we can, in addition to UBI, expand and convert the EITC to a simpler "reverse payroll tax" that automatically tops up workers' paychecks by matching dollar for dollar up to a point.  Such carrots would work far better than sticks in the long run.)

(And to all of the truly horrible and insufferable bosses out there, well, hear that?  That's the sound of me playing the world's smallest violin for you.  So go swallow your pride (and greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, wrath, and lust, while you're at it), before it swallows you whole.  And at the same time, to all of the users, welchers, leeches, dregs, and ne'er-do-wells, there's the door.  Don't let it hit you on the way out!)

Nor is there any credible evidence that substance abuse would significantly increase either as a result of UBI, and it may even decrease.  But just to drive the point home even further, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman argues that even if 90% of the population sat around smoking weed and playing video games instead of working, a UBI would still be better on balance than not having one, as everyone would be free to pursue their passions, and the remaining 10% would innovatively create new wealth.  Not that he thinks that 90% would actually do that, of course, and nor do we, but the point was well-made nonetheless.  One can also point to the Rat Park studies as well.  It is amazing how addiction of any kind diminishes or even disappears when rats (or people) are not treated like caged animals in the aptly-named "rat race"!

(Some cynics will inevitably bring up the infamous Universe 25 "mouse utopia" experiments, but that would really be a gross disanalogy, since a gilded cage is still a cage regardless. And in any case, at the end of the day, rats and mice are not people.)

And finally, a real pragmatist would realize that automation really is inevitable in the long run.  Contrary to what the neo-Luddites like to argue, fighting against it will NOT stop it, only delay it a bit.  The best that we genuine progressives can do is admit that fact and do whatever we can to ensure that the fruits of this automation will benefit all of humanity, and not just the oligarchs at the top.  To do so, we must take the power back from the oligarchs.  And a crucial step to that goal is a Universal Basic Income, so We the People can actually have some bargaining power, no longer dependent on our employers for survivial.  No longer would anyone have to be at the mercy of the all too often merciless.  Whether we get this one right will basically be the difference between a futuristic pragmatic utopia or protopia (as Buckminster Fuller envisioned) or a horrifying technocratic dystopia straight out of 1984, Brave New World, or [insert other dystopian novel here].  So let's choose the right side of history!

After all, as the late, great Buckminster Fuller--the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century, famously said all the way back in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Thus, on balance, a Universal Basic Income Guarantee for all is a good idea regardless.  A win-win-win situation for everyone but the oligarchs.  And the only real arguments against it are selfish, patronizing, paternalistic, and/or sadistic ones, which really means there are NO good arguments against it in a free and civilized society.  So what are we waiting for?

For more information and a much deeper dive into this topic, see the TSAP's "Why UBI?" page.

P.S.  I realized that the above arguments are largely utilitarian or consequentialist in nature, which still leave the reader wondering about nonconsequentialist or deontological arguments.  For the latter, Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative can also be said to apply to UBI:  "Always treat humanity as an end in itself, and never solely as a means", as well as his principle of universalizability.  Or as Robert Reich says, "The economy exists to make our lives better. We do not exist to make the economy better."  And let's not forget the Golden Rule:  "Do unto others, what you would have others do unto you", per Jesus Christ, plus the more subtle Silver Rule "Do NOT do unto others, what you would NOT have others do unto you," per Confucius, as well.  Thus, even when ignoring all utilitarian arguments, the case for UBI still exceeds any case against it.

(See also some recent articles that directly or indirectly mention the concept of UBI, here and here.)

And regardless, if we make the perfect the enemy of the good, we ultimately end up with neither. 

(Mic drop)

UPDATE:  And in case anyone brings up the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers of the USA, keep in mind that one of them, Thomas Paine, actually advocated for some flavor of what we would now call UBI, what he called a "demogrant".  So UBI is actually well within the envelope of the Founders' idea of limited government, and truly transcends the usual left-right political spectrum.  Such disparate thinkers from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman to Charles Murray to Nina Turner to Andrew Yang to Ellen Brown to Rodger Malcolm Mitchell to even (however briefly) Hillary Clinton have all gone on the record supporting some flavor of UBI, as has the entire libertarian-leaning red state of Alaska since the 1970s.

A "Job Guarantee", Without The Guarantee?

The TSAP has once endorsed the MMT idea of a Job Guarantee (JG), which is exactly what it sounds like.  Of course, we also supported Universal Basic Income (UBI) with NO strings attached as well for years now, but still maintained that a JG would be good in addition to that.  However, we no longer support that idea anymore.  JG, in all of its flavors, has far too many conceptual, logistical, and ontological problems to be workable at scale, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes in his article, and several others.

So what do we at the TSAP support instead of JG?  Well, we clearly support UBI, hands down.  But beyond that, we support a scaled-up version of something like Job Corps, and which is basically a Job Guarantee but without the "guarantee" part.  That is, simply a jobs program, both for finding and creating jobs as needed, and one that provides only useful work rather than the Sisyphean make-work boondoggles that would inevitably occur in a true JG program.  Otherwise, it is guaranteed to fail.

Don't Want A Worker Shortage? Stop Paying Starvation Wages!

The media hype over a supposedly widespread worker shortage gas been rife lately, and of course being blamed on a supposedly over-generous social safety net, particularly the expanded unemployment benefits put in place during the pandemic and still continuing to this day.  That supposedly makes it pay more to stay on the dole than to go back to work.  But the "absent referent" here, the biggest elephant in the room, is that wages are currently still too low.  If the federal minimum wage had kept up productivity gains since 1968, it would be about $22/hour today, similar to the current de facto minimum wage in most of the Nordic countries.  Given how the worker shortage is primarily concentrated in the lowest-paying jobs, the solution is very simple:  if employers want employees so desperately, then stop paying starvation wages, and pay the workers at LEAST what the market says they are really worth, and of course enough to, you know, LIVE on.  Problem solved.  Next.

In the meantime, as for the idea of unemployment benefits being too generous, if a true labor shortage were really a widespread problem, all they would need to do is take the extra $300/week bonus and instead repurpose that money as a wage subsidy to low-wage workers.  The latter bonus could be a sort of "reverse payroll tax" that automatically tops up one's paychecks directly.  Otherwise, leave the current benefits as is, albeit perhaps reinstating the work search requirements after some time, and require furloughed workers who are called back to their jobs to return to work after a reasonable amount of time.

It is worth noting that an actual Universal Basic Income (UBI) contains no such perverse incentives (unlike over-generous unemployment benefits), since one can still receive it regardless rather than have to give it up upon returning to work.  But it can still effectively increase the bargaining power of workers, increasing the de facto minimum wage.

Raise The Floor, And Also Trim The Top

It is well known that excessive inequality is very harmful to both the economy and society at large.  Even before we learned the truth about Monetary Sovereignty (MS) and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) in 2018, the TSAP has long supported both a Universal Basic Income for all, and has also supported hiking taxes on the rich as well.  And even after learning about MS and MMT, we still support hiking taxes on the ultra-rich, and for good reason.

Some may be scratching their heads.  Why do we even need federal taxes at all, if our Monetarily Sovereign federal government has infinite money?  They clearly don't need taxes to pay their bills.  But taxes also have other useful functions as well:

• Taxes compel the use of the official currency, thereby giving it value in the first place.  
• Taxes automatically "claw back" excess liquidity in the money supply due to the "velocity of money", thus to an extent crudely preventing demand-pull inflation before it happens.
• Taxes can be used for social engineering (think vice taxes and Pigouvian taxes) in ways that are otherwise difficult, impossible, illiberal, illegal, and/or unethical to do by other means.
• And finally, progressive taxes can be used to "trim the top" when levied on the top 0.1%, thus reducing inequality without leading to runaway inflation.  Rodger Malcolm Mitchell compares this to a "trophic cascade", such as when wolves (i.e. the federal government) keep elk populations (i.e. the oligarchs) from getting out of control and devouring everything in sight.

So what sort of federal taxes would be suitable for this purpose, knowing what we know now?

• A rich-only, steeply progressive income tax like the kind that prevailed before WWII.  At least the first $100,000 to $500,000 would be exempt, and the new brackets would include marginal rates of 50% above the first $1 million, 70% above the first $10 million, and perhaps 90% above the first $100 million.  With NO LOOPHOLES this time. 
• Tax dividends and capital gains the exact same as ordinary income, but index the basis to inflation for capital gains.
• For the largest corporations, especially those who are "too big to fail", a top tax rate of at least 50%, with NO LOOPHOLES this time.  Tax only retained earnings.  Smaller corporations should not be taxed at all.
• The Universal Exchange Tax, i.e. a tiny tax of 0.1% or less on all electronic transactions.  It would actually be highly progressive in practice since the rich make a disproportionately high amount and number of transactions compared to the non-rich.  "The more you play, the more you pay."
• Various vice taxes (alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, etc.) and Pigouvian taxes (pollution and resource depletion).
• Land value taxes and severance taxes on natural resources such as oil and gas.
• And, of course, the estate tax needs to be made more progressive as well.

State and local governments, of course, are not Monetarily Sovereign, and thus need to raise revenue to pay their bills.  And they can piggyback on the aforementioned federal taxes and levy their own, especially the Universal Exchange Tax and the land value tax and severance taxes, and thus reduce or eliminate their currently regressive sales and property taxes.  Additionally, federal aid to the states should be increased for precisesly the same reason.

A UBI would indeed abolish absolute poverty, no doubt about that.  And that alone would have numerous individual and social benefits.  But without progressive taxation of the top 1% and 0.1%, it would do nothing to reduce relative poverty, and may paradoxically increase inequality.  And inequality in itself is harmful, over and above the effects of poverty.  Thus, it is not enough to either raise the floor or trim the top, we need to do both.  Yesterday.

Thus, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez essentially has the right idea as far as taxes go.  And of course, the oligarchs and their sycophantic lackeys are coming down hard on her, but that just goes to show how effective her ideas are in terms of reducing the Gap between the haves and have-nots, which the oligarchs utterly depend on.  All the more reason to do it.

UPDATE:  Elizabeth Warren recently proposed a wealth tax of 2% on the assets of those with a net worth of $50 million and up (that is, on the top 0.1%), and up to 3% above the first billion.  Only the amount over the first $50 million would be taxed.  Controversial as it is, it actually makes a lot of sense, and the TSAP would certainly not oppose it. 

What "Give People Money" Gets Right--And Wrong at the Same Time

One of our favorite journalists, Annie Lowrey, recently wrote a book called Give People Money:  How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World.  As its self-explanatory title suggests, she is clearly in favor of the idea, at least in principle, and notes all of the many benefits to society that a Universal Basic Income (UBI) would have.  She does a great job of delineating such benefits and thoroughly debunks numerous myths about this big idea.  So overall, it is a good book.

That said, while her thesis starts out practically on fire in terms of ambition, it really starts to coast towards the end when the practical issue of cost starts to seep in.  Then, her proposals start to get significantly less ambitious than a true UBI, namely a negative income tax (like the kind Nixon once proposed and was ultimately weakened into what became the Earned Income Tax Credit) and/or a smaller UBI-style payment for children only.  True, those weaker versions would indeed be cheaper, and far better than doing nothing at all.  And it would certainly be more likely to pass through Congress, no doubt about that.  But the larger point is still being missed in terms of the nature of the cost issue.

And that larger point is that since the United States federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, the whole cost issue is really a non-issue when you think about it.  It is a Big Lie that federal taxes actually pay for federal spending, and that the federal government can somehow run short of dollars.  They can literally create infinite money, thus money is literally no object in that regard, if only they would act like it and dispense with the Big Lie once and for all.

In fact, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell himself advocates a form of UBI that he calls the Economic Bonus (EB), which is Step #3 of his recommended Ten Steps to Prosperity.  It is similar to Social Security for all, but without the FICA tax (which he believes should be abolished), and paid for entirely via money creation (i.e. spending it into existence).  Though the figures he provides are not set in stone, he advocates that we start with $1000/month for everyone over the age of 21 and $500/month for everyone below that age.  The TSAP fully agrees, except that we think the age threshold for the full amount should be 18 instead.  Or perhaps give the same amount (say, $500) to everyone regardless of age to start with.  Either way, once it is started, the numbers can be easily adjusted.  And $1000/$500 is a very handy number since that is roughly the amount that would be enough to eliminate poverty as well as give workers much more bargaining power than they have currently, while still not being so ludicrously high as to trigger runaway inflation or other adverse effects.  And best of all, it wouldn't cost the taxpayer one penny.

And Presto!  The square has thus been circled--or is that the other way around?

Oh, and about that inflation thingy, keep in mind that despite three rounds of QE, nearly $30 trillion in secret bailouts for the banks, $21+ trillion in national debt, and the Pentagon "losing" another $21 trillion despite putting two (or four) wars on the proverbial credit card, all of this money created out of thin air in fact, and economic growth finally roaring back to life (for now), we are still nowhere near the point of runaway inflation.  Not by a long shot.  If anything, we are still under the shadow of what Larry Summers calls "secular stagnation" thanks to chronic, extreme economic inequality and related socioeconomic ills.  And if ever we did get anywhere near that point, we know now exactly how to prevent and cure such inflation via interest rate control, and failing that, simply create less new money going forward.

So what are we waiting for?