: "Thomas Lunde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >The Numbers >In round numbers, Canada’s population is 30 million and if every citizen >received the Basic Income, the total cost would be $450 billion. Canada’s >current budget is $150 billion leaving a shortfall of $300 billion. Seems >pretty impossible, doesn’t it? > >Just for example, let’s say that it takes $50 billion of our current budget >of $150 billion to run the country’s infrastructure and we add this to the >cost of a Basic Income. This would raise our Budget requirements to $500 >billion. (The other 100 billion is money paid out to EI, pensions, Indian >Affairs payments, the Armed Forces, Medicare and all other programs that can >be discontinued because the Basic Income will replace them. Plus the single >biggest expense in the budget which is our National Debt.) [...] >As the government withholds $4500 of everyone’s Basic Income and applies it >to the three Universal Programs plus the debt, this transfer will bring the >government another $135 billion leaving a shortfall of $150 billion. (30 >million Basic Income recipients times $4500 equals $135 billion) You've done a bit of legerdemain here: the government is currently spending money on the _interest_ on the national debt, not on repaying the debt itself. These are two quite distinct entities. Thus you can't count your proposed payment out of BI towards ND repayment as a reduction of current budget allotment toward ND interest payment. You must account for the debt repayment and the interest costs as two separate items. The total cost will be about $65B in interest (around 40% of the total budget) plus $60B in principal, in the first year, with the first figure declining in subsequent years as the total debt declines. >A. Benefits > >1. The core of this idea is the transfer of wealth from individuals to >families. It is not correct to say, just poor families, as some of my >examples have pointed out. It is to put adequate resources available to all >families, no matter what their composition but especially to larger >families. One criticism that might be directed at this approach is that it >would encourage large families. I don’t know whether this is true or not. I would suggest two amendments to the structure of BI for minors: first, the payment should start at around $5K at birth, and ramp to the full $15K at age 18. Second, the initial rate, and the ramp curve, should be diminished for children beyond the second in a family (not sure how to work it for our current predominant system of serial monogamy - perhaps count only the child number wrt the mother), thus providing a fundamental policy disincentive for large family size, while not penalizing the offspring in adulthood.
