Happy Independence Day! After 250 years, I think it's time we live up to our founding ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is no life without the ability to afford it, no liberty without the power to say no, and no happiness with unmet basic needs.
UBI makes our ideals real.
One way to go about universal basic income is to pair it with a consumption tax. This could be in the form of a value-added tax as all OECD nations but us already use, or in the form of a tiny transaction tax on all electronic payments like how Visa/MC work. I consider this as another layer for UBI.
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/fund-universal-basic-income-consumption-tax-vat
New article where I propose we make corporations issue 1.5% new shares each year into a public wealth fund and then sell it all off slowly every day over the course of the year in order to convert it to cash and issue a $365 monthly dividend to every adult and child as the Great American Dividend.
This essay has been on my mind since 2023 and I'm happy to have finally published it. It's an argument for UBI that may not resonate with many, but if it does, I hope it does strongly. I feel so much gratitude for every human who came before me, and I fight for a better future for those yet to come.
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-primordial-credit-argument-for #UBI
UBI is a human right. It became one the moment public land became private property. If you only get something in compensation for that loss if your income is low, your right is infringed. If you only get certain approved services, your right is still infringed.
A right is UNIVERSAL + UNCONDITIONAL
https://www.scottsantens.com/the-spaceballs-argument-for-unconditional-universal-basic-income-ubi/
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@scottsantens/116567646799090817
This is the best exposition I’ve ever read of why UBI is not only affordable, it’s efficient.
#UBI. #Politics.
@scottsantens In Mexico, any person over 65 receives a state pension, with a recent exception so that women can receive it at 60, in recognition of unpaid care labour. It is now engraved in the constitution.
The neoliberal economists and commentocrats are raging since implementation. They claim it is unsustainable, somehow clientelist!, and unfair: the lame goto argument to block debate, appealing to emotion.
It has proven to be cheap to run, immensely popular and empowering for the elderly
I've made this argument repeatedly, but I felt the need to try and make it definitively this time. Yes, universal basic income should be universal by even including billionaires like Elon. Here are all the reasons why universality is superior to means testing.
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-universality-argument-for-basic-income-ubi #UBI
"Every human deserves the basic security to live a good life, and to have a safe floor from which to launch themselves as high as they wish to go, free from drudgery and lack."
Quote by a signer of the AI Pledge for Humanity in support of universal basic income
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/the-ai-pledge-for-humanity #UBI
We constructed poverty as we know it. Poverty is a legal status imposed on those excluded from legal access to the needs of life. It is economic injustice. It is a weapon built to fear.
Poverty is a Death Star.
Happy Star Wars Day and May the 4th be with UBI!
I've been seeing a lot of pull quotes specifically about UBI from this article, but I love this section talking about the power of a community of creators. Every period I've been really inspired to do good work, it's because I'm in an incredible community. www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-d...
The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.” https://www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-de-poitrine-argument-for-ubi/
I've been following @scottsantens for years as he's probably the greatest advocate for #UniversalBasicIncome out there, and this essay is one of the best he's written
https://www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-de-poitrine-argument-for-ubi/
Maybe the best article I've read all day. About #UBI and #AngineDePoitrine.
https://www.scottsantens.com/the-angine-de-poitrine-argument-for-ubi/
This was a fun one for me to write. It's the Angine de Poitrine argument for universal basic income. We could have more weird, awesome, truly human stuff like this if we all had UBI. We could have more Einsteins too. And because those things are true, the cost of NOT doing #UBI isn't worth it.
It's Tax Day so it's time to dive into why Democrats should not be pushing for a larger standard deduction and should instead be pushing to replace it with a fully refundable $4,500 standard credit that can be received monthly (a small $375/mo #UBI) in advance like the 2021 expanded child tax credit.
The launch of Artemis II got me thinking about some UBI history and how Nixon saw his guaranteed income proposal and the Apollo missions to the Moon as both serving the same objective of showing people that government could actually work for them and accomplish great things. Let's do that with #UBI.
We should have started a universal basic income back in 1975, and it should have grown this entire time in line with national productivity growth. My latest:
https://ieet.substack.com/p/universal-basic-income-the-dividend?triedRedirect=true #UBI
Thank you to everyone who came to watch this event live last night in person! For everyone who missed it, here's the live stream of it. #UBI #BasicIncome
https://www.youtube.com/live/fxFT0s-1pjI?si=dYpioWjcTtTMUrqo
We don't know what impact AI will have on productivity in our immediate future but Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the only way to share AI and productivity gains with EVERYONE, and it needs to be everyone because we all trained it with our data/work and funded its development with public dollars.
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/universal-basic-income-is-your-productivity