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Why shouldn't basic income be $100,000?

Most napkin math proposal for basic income are between $10,000 and $15,000. That's quite hard to make work but it's maaaayyybbeee posssibly achievable. It's at the outer limit of doable but meaningful.

In the US 36k per person would account for 66% of GDP. It'd be 85% of GDP in France. These are not viable figures.



It shouldn't be $100k because that exceeds mean income, and we don't have strong evidence about how much BI improves productivity.

I think the reason most proposals are well below the mean is that we prefer a modest effective intervention, and the desired effect is to remove the hardship of poverty, not to achieve perfect income equality.




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