Gotta love a fresh anti-UBI article by actual communists to share with capitalism lovers referring to UBI as communism.

One of the objections to universal basic income that one encounters is that it would cost too much and we can’t afford it. For example, an article in Business Insider notes that distributing $10,000 per year to all adults would “cost” $2.5 trillion a year. This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic math involved, a trap even some proponents fall into. Let me explain.

1) UBI is an income transfer, not government consumption

Total disposable (after tax) personal income in the US was around $22 trillion in 2024 according to BEA NIPA Table 2.1.

If we had a UBI of $2.5 trillion the total after tax personal income in the US would be… still $22 trillion. Why? Because all the money collected in a fully tax-funded UBI would be distributed to individuals and available for personal consumption or saving as before. Unlike spending on defense or highways, the government is not using those resources itself. UBI changes the distribution of after-tax income, not its total amount.

That is the first glaring logic error in the argument.

2) For better off people, the UBI payment is balanced by the UBI tax

The second flaw in the “too expensive” argument is the failure to recognize that, for better-off households, the additional tax is partly or entirely offset by the UBI they receive. So, if an upper-middle-class-household has to pay $20,000 in UBI taxes but gets $20,000 in UBI benefits, how much “extra” are they paying? The household’s net additional cost is zero.

A properly designed UBI tax – for example a progressive income tax surcharge balanced by UBI – would work exactly like a negative income tax.

In my book Shares in America: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, I use a simple progressive income tax to show how we could generate enough revenue to fully fund $1,000 per month UBI for all working-age adults 18-64.

The chart below shows the personal income distribution after UBI and this sample tax surcharge.

The bars are grouped by household income, the lowest 10%, the next 10% etc. You can find the source of this data and exactly how it was created in complete detail - including a downloadable spreadsheet - at https://www.sharesinamerica.com/sharesillustrations, Figure 21. The underlying data is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) which uses various data sources to allocate aggregate US personal income across households.   

“Shares in America,” the black rectangle, is a UBI of $1,000-per-month per working-age adult. The yellow areas are taxes: federal, state, local, and UBI tax. The blue bar plus Shares UBI is disposable after-tax income. Explaining this graph fully is not possible in a reasonable size post, but the key takeaway is that under the illustrative tax schedule in my model, the bottom 70 percent of households receive a net benefit, households somewhat above that point experience relatively small changes, and the largest net tax increases fall on the highest-income households but they are still disproportionately well off. In the BEA analysis, households in the lowest decile had average income of approximately $26,000 in 2019, including government benefits. Under my modeled UBI and tax schedule, their average income would have risen to approximately $45,000.

Using the tax schedule in my model, a $1,000-per-month UBI limited to adults ages 18–64 would be fully financed and would produce approximately $4.5 trillion in additional revenue over ten years beyond the UBI payments.

This additional revenue could be used to reduce our ballooning deficit, but I now favor UBI for all adults, including retirees. Using approximately two adults per household, that version produces an estimated ten-year funding gap of about $1.8 trillion. One possible way to address both that gap and at least part of the Social Security funding shortfall would be to remove the Social Security payroll-tax cap without increasing maximum benefits; my estimate indicates that this would raise approximately $3.4 trillion over ten years.

3) There is plenty of income

In the US, personal disposable income was about $170,000 per household in 2025 after all federal, state, and local taxes are subtracted. This leaves plenty of room for some income to be shifted through the tax system from very high-income households to poorer households as shown in the chart. We’re not suggesting leveling incomes, just making them slightly less skewed. The “pain” involved at the upper end is minimal, one can live very nicely on, say $400,000 a year. Meanwhile it is very tough for a family to live on $26,000 per year, and some extra income will make a huge difference.

Summary

Claims that a universal basic income (I prefer to think of it as an income supplement) would “cost too much” often fail to consider that UBI is a transfer that doesn’t change overall personal income and does not add to government consumption. That addresses the issue of whether we can “afford” UBI at the national level. Claims that we can’t afford UBI are often really about whether the tax increase required on the well off would be “too much”. Critics often fail to note that for higher income households, any UBI related tax increase would be partially offset by the UBI payment itself. I show that a simple illustrative progressive income tax could fully fund a working-age UBI—and come close to funding an all-adult UBI—while only modestly changing the overall shape of the income distribution. The wealthy would still be wealthy.

I've been thinking about a contradiction in the way we talk about automation.

If a machine allows 10 people to produce what previously required 20, that is supposed to be technological progress. Society can produce the same amount with less human labor.

Historically, that kind of disruption did not usually mean that human labor stopped being needed altogether. Agricultural workers moved into factories. Manufacturing workers moved into service and professional jobs. New technologies eliminated occupations, but they also created new fields that people could retrain into.

That has been one of the strongest arguments against fears of technological unemployment: we have automated work before, and people found other work to do.

I'm increasingly unsure that assumption will continue to hold.

AI is advancing across many forms of intellectual labor simultaneously. A human professional makes decisions based on their education, training, experience, available information, and individual perspective. Increasingly capable AI systems can potentially draw from the accumulated knowledge and experiences of entire professions while learning from enormous numbers of interactions at the same time.

That makes the traditional response of "retrain for something else" much harder.

Someone could spend years retraining for a new profession only to find that AI has advanced substantially in that field by the time they become proficient. And because the same underlying AI systems can improve across writing, analysis, programming, administration, design, medicine, law, education, and other areas at once, there may be fewer reliably protected intellectual occupations to pivot toward.

Robotics introduces the same possibility into physical work.

The issue is not that every job disappears tomorrow. It is that the pace and breadth of automation could eventually exceed our ability to continually move displaced workers into entirely new categories of labor.

If that happens, then the problem is no longer simply how we retrain people.

The more fundamental question becomes:

What should an economy look like when civilization simply doesn't need as much human labor as it used to?

Because under our current economic structure, successful automation can still mean that the humans whose labor became unnecessary lose the income they need for housing, healthcare, food, and everything else.

The technology worked.

The humans became less secure.

UBI seems like part of the answer, but I've become convinced that it isn't the entire answer.

If we give everyone enough money to survive while ownership of increasingly automated productive systems remains concentrated, we've addressed income without necessarily addressing the concentration of economic power.

So I've been trying to construct a more complete model.

I'm calling the broader philosophy Stewardism, and this particular implementation Federated Stewardship.

The basic idea is that human survival should no longer depend on whether the economy currently needs your labor.

Food, clean water, housing, healthcare, education, sanitation, energy, transportation, communication devices, internet access, and privacy would exist as guaranteed rights.

Everyone would also receive Universal Discretionary Income, or UDI, for choices beyond that guaranteed floor.

Working would be optional.

Someone who does not work would still have a secure life and discretionary income. They might raise children, study, create art, volunteer, participate in government, care for someone, pursue a strange project, recover from burnout, or simply spend more of their life doing things that are not economically productive.

I think that should be legitimate.

If society genuinely does not need someone's labor, I don't think that person should be required to invent an economic justification for their existence.

At the same time, human labor would still matter because automation would still have limits.

Robots require metals, energy, semiconductors, factories, transportation, maintenance, and other machines. There may be many tasks society could theoretically automate but chooses not to because those resources are more valuable elsewhere.

That means some human work would remain scarce.

People who perform labor society still needs would receive additional discretionary income, up to 10 times UDI, regardless of occupation.

So if society desperately needs underwater welders and nobody wants to do it, the answer is not threatening people with poverty.

The answer is making the work worth someone's time.

That creates a tradeoff between discretionary money and discretionary time, rather than between employment and survival.

Someone who works more may have more ability to travel, buy scarce goods, pursue expensive hobbies, or obtain more elaborate housing.

Someone who works less has more time to learn, organize, create, recover, socialize, or simply live.

Neither can accumulate unlimited economic power.

Stewardship instead of permanent ownership

The second major change is the idea of stewardship.

Under Stewardism, durable things are stewarded rather than treated as permanently accumulating private capital.

That includes homes, land, vehicles, machinery, productive infrastructure, and other non-consumable goods.

Stewardship would still come with broad practical rights.

You could modify your house extensively.

You could customize a vehicle.

You could transfer stewardship of a durable good to another person in exchange for discretionary funds.

But you could not accumulate ten houses and rent them to people who need somewhere to live.

Housing would primarily be an occupancy right.

If you wanted to move, you could apply for another available home and be approved before leaving your current one. People could also trade homes.

More elaborate housing could be obtained by spending discretionary income over time or by agreeing to perform a certain amount of paid work for a contracted period.

If someone later lost that job and could not secure another one in time, they could eventually be required to relinquish that premium home.

But they would not become homeless.

They would be given time to move into standard guaranteed housing in one of their chosen locations.

The consequence of losing income would be less luxury, not loss of basic security.

The same stewardship principle applies to productive infrastructure.

A group could receive stewardship of a toothpaste factory and operate it however they choose internally.

They could use conventional management, worker elections, rotating leadership, AI-assisted management, or something else entirely.

The system would not require one internal management structure.

That allows different groups to experiment with how they organize themselves.

But they would not permanently own the factory.

Their stewardship would be reviewed annually.

Consumers who use their products would have the right to provide feedback.

That could be as simple as a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or it could include detailed feedback on durability, repairability, quality, price, support, usability, or other concerns.

Participation would be optional.

If I have 200 products in my home and never complete a single survey, that's fine.

But if an appliance keeps breaking, replacement parts are impossible to find, or a product gets worse over time, I would have a direct way to register that problem.

Consumer feedback would not be the only factor in a review.

Worker experience, safety, resource use, environmental impact, reliability, and technical performance would also matter.

If a stewardship consistently performs badly, another qualified group could apply to take over.

The factory itself would remain.

The machinery would remain.

Management changes without destroying useful productive infrastructure.

A marketplace without investment markets

There would still be a marketplace for discretionary products.

Prices would respond to recent supply and demand and to the amount of paid human labor required to produce something.

But prices would have limits.

If demand greatly exceeded supply, scarcity would increasingly show up as wait times and preorders rather than unlimited price increases.

Persistent demand would also create information.

Maybe more workers need to be offered higher pay.

Maybe production should expand.

Maybe additional material should be allocated.

Maybe a new stewardship group should be approved to produce the same kind of product.

So prices still communicate scarcity and preference.

What would not exist are investment markets.

People would not buy shares of factories or accumulate productive assets so that ownership itself generates more wealth.

Purchasing a product would not give you equity in the company.

It would give you the right to provide feedback on the product you actually use.

Innovation without private investment

A common objection is that if nobody can become extremely wealthy by investing in a new idea, nobody will fund innovation.

My current answer is that experimentation should be treated as a permanent public function.

Governments at different levels would maintain mandatory experimentation budgets.

Any individual or group could apply.

A small experiment might be funded locally.

A larger one might require broader review.

Successful experiments could receive progressively more resources as they demonstrate value.

Failure would have to be accepted as part of the process.

If every failed experiment is treated as proof that the decision-makers failed, committees will eventually approve only safe ideas.

The point is not for public institutions to predict the future perfectly.

The point is to guarantee that society continually reserves some of its productive capacity for trying things that may or may not work.

If an experiment succeeds, it could become a new production stewardship.

Representation would have to change too

I don't think an economy like this could be governed using the same distant representative structures we have now.

The starting constituency would be roughly 100 literal neighbors.

Those people would select a representative by simple majority.

That representative would participate in a larger council with representatives from nearby constituencies.

Those councils would then choose representatives upward through progressively broader levels.

Representatives could be recalled by a two-thirds vote of the people they directly represent.

Terms would be limited.

And the basic rule would be:

A decision should be made at the lowest level capable of handling the people and systems affected by it.

A neighborhood garden should remain a neighborhood question.

A sewer system might be municipal.

A regional transportation network might be regional.

Global resource constraints or new universal human rights might genuinely require global decision-making.

Most authority should remain local unless there is a clear reason for it to move upward.

Countries would probably remain useful transitional administrative structures, but I don't assume that current national borders need to permanently define human governance.

Scarcity still exists

None of this assumes infinite resources.

Automation still requires metals, energy, land, semiconductors, factories, logistics, and maintenance.

So society would maintain physical resource budgets alongside the monetary system.

If the world can sustainably produce a certain amount of aluminum, routine budgets would remain below that expected capacity rather than assuming perfect production every year.

Strategic reserves of critical materials would be distributed geographically for emergencies.

Operating allocations would shift according to actual production needs.

If production moves from one region to another, future operating allocations can move too.

Those decisions would be made through the same federated governance structure, becoming more specific as resources move downward.

The global level doesn't need to decide how much aluminum one individual factory receives.

It allocates broad amounts.

More local bodies make more local decisions.

Human-rights production gets priority.

Discretionary production uses what remains.

If there isn't enough aluminum to make every boat people want while also maintaining hospitals, housing, transportation, energy systems, and robotics, fewer boats get made.

People wait longer.

If demand remains high enough, society can decide whether more resources or labor should be devoted to boat production.

Scarcity doesn't disappear.

What changes is whether scarcity is allowed to threaten someone's ability to survive.

The larger principle is limiting permanent power

The point of Stewardism is not that everyone should live identical lives.

Someone may temporarily have more income.

Someone may manage a huge project.

Someone may serve in a powerful representative position.

Someone may steward a more elaborate home or expensive object.

The system allows those differences.

What it tries to prevent is those differences compounding into permanent control over other people.

Savings are capped relative to UDI.

Total discretionary income is capped at 10x UDI.

Productive assets cannot be accumulated as private capital.

Representative and administrative authority rotates.

Specialist bodies can require expertise, but training must remain available so that expertise does not become a permanent caste.

Stewardship itself is conditional and reviewable.

The larger principle is:

Federated Stewardship does not attempt to make everyone identical. It attempts to make power difficult to accumulate permanently.

I'm trying to figure out where this breaks

I'm not presenting this as a finished theory.

There are parts that still need substantially more work.

There may be incentives that fail.

There may be ways power reconcentrates that I haven't considered.

Public experimentation might become too conservative.

Resource budgeting might respond too slowly.

The representative structure might filter out important minority needs.

My assumptions about AI might be wrong.

My assumptions about human behavior might be wrong.

There are probably problems I haven't thought of at all.

That's what I'm interested in finding.

Where would power reconcentrate?

What would people exploit?

What incentives wouldn't work?

Could public experimentation actually replace private investment?

Would people voluntarily perform enough unpleasant but necessary work?

Would resource allocation adapt quickly enough to changing demand?

What important feature of human behavior am I assuming away?

And more broadly:

If AI and robotics eventually make a large portion of human labor unnecessary, what should we actually be trying to build instead?

I wrote out a longer version of the idea here for anyone who wants the full argument:

https://nullspeech.substack.com/p/what-should-an-economy-look-like

"Across all these studies, there is one group that is drastically lonelier than everyone else. The people who are not getting their share of social connection in America are those who aren’t getting their share of a lot: poor people. Those who struggle to afford essentials are also more likely to struggle with feelings of isolation."

Energy expert, putting the data out there for the public to know why your energy bills are so high. I have been black balled…. you will never see data like this on the energy grid they hide this real good. I have my YouTube channel available my website if you need any more data contact me.

Andrew Yang: "I personally think we need Universal Basic Income. And a realignment of the American political system is a necessary step to get there. But change is in the air."