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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3450 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think of a guaranteed Minimum Income?

As johu and oecolampadius have pointed out, there are some issues with the benefits of the situation, but this is more of a cost analysis.

Our upper limit for a Mincome would be the GDP of the United States. Currently that would be around $53,042. Of course that doesn't make sense as it would require the redistribution of all income a company had received in the interest of the common good. When in actuality it would prevent the company from investing in future goods and technologies and cause the future decline of the GDP and the Mincome in kind. But there's the upper limit of what is possible.

Then there's a lower limit, which is nominally 0. But in practicality there is already a lot of government assistance going on. Including all the income transfers which government engages in to promote the social welfare, we have a total welfare spending bill of 2.3 trillion dollars. Divided by the population of the United States, welfare spending per capita is $7,210.

So at the current levels, our practical lower limit is around $7,210. And our upper limit is $53,042. Neither of these are very practical since the poverty level is $11,770 for a single person. The problem with using the poverty level is that it doesn't include non-cash support in its evaluaton of poverty, which is another way of saying we don't count welfare in terms of making the poverty line 'work'. You have to add in SNAP and other welfare resources to make that poverty level livable. If we were to add the entire welfare per capita amount to $11,770 we would get $18,980 per person. That level is probably a little higher than the Mincome for a poverty level because it counts income transfers that we wouldn't normally consider 'welfare' like Pell grants. But without going into the numbers in more detail, which you could and I just don't want to, that's the best number I am going to come up with.

For a single person, the current Mincome would be around $18,980 which would be an increase in per capita welfare spending of $11,770. To generate this amount we would have to increase government revenue by 3.76 trillion dollars bringing the total welfare spending to $6.06 trillion. This would increase welfare spending to 36.1% of GDP.

That number is also on the high side, since most welfare recipients don't live alone. The average US family size is 2.54 people and has been relatively declining only very slowly for years.

This means there are around 126,000,000 families in the US. Because the poverty level changes by $4,160 after the first family member, we can estimate the smaller number. This is a change in poverty level at a rate of .26 of the original amount per additional person. Extrapolating this rate to our Mincome of $18,980, the additional person adds $4,934. Thus the Mincome would cost closer to ($18,980)(1)(126,000,000) + ($4,934)(1.54)(126,000,000). That comes out to 3.35 trillion. This would increase government welfare spending by 1.05 trillion to a total 19.97% of GDP which would be an increase of 6.27%.

That's less than I thought it would be.