Not with any utility or intelligence, though. "It's not new money, it's existing money" and "remember that one time they gave that one payment of a lot of money to Kuwait" and "Alaska sort-of" are the sort of non-answers that don't advance thought. Here: So... just for comparison's sake, that's six times the defense budget, and 3/4ths the entire budget of the United States. So... existing money means we either slash all government spending by 3/4ths or we tax everybody by an additional 75%. And then we're talking about Alaska, where a big mac combo is $9. By the bye, "minimum basic income" speaks to the defense industry, too - land of mythical $60 hammers. Down to my very bones I love the idea of MBI. But I also know that $1000 a month is approximately 1/2 the price difference between "My family's life in Seattle" vs. "My family's life in Los Angeles." $1000 a month goes a fuckton further in San Antonio than it does in San Francisco and set aside that whole "increase our tax revenue by 75%" there are going to be some deeply-fought structural upheavals from that. Because let's look at real numbers. My family of 3 paid $14k in taxes last year. This scheme says we're owed $36k and we're a six-figure family. How are you going to structure that in any sort of way that seems even vaguely equitable to anyone?I get asked often about the potential downsides of basic income. One of the first questions people seem to have is if all prices will rise as a result, nullifying the entire point of it all. This is actually the first question I confronted in-depth. The answer is basically that it depends on a lot of variables, but for the most part not in any way to the degree people fear.
Now that we know more about what gives money its value, and how we actually want a small amount of inflation, we need to understand that basic income is not the idea of printing $3 trillion new dollars every year and dropping it on everyone from helicopters.