The Definition Is Right. The Arithmetic Is the Problem

People-powered, AI-Generated AI-assisted draft, verified, and corrected: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5 Edited and curated by: Guy Wolf *Disclaimer: AI has been known to malfunction “hallucinate” therefore, a human-in-the-middle approach with a separate draft and verification AI has been used to provide the best quality, most accurate apolitical research on this topic Subscribe now In Paris, in May 2024, a reporter asked Elon Musk whether he worried about losing his job to artificial intelligence. His answer was calm. “In a benign scenario,” he said, “probably none of us will have a job.” Then he added that the world would have “universal high income – and not universal basic income.”[1] The phrase stuck. It has a nice ring, like an upgrade. Basic is what you get when times are tight. High is what you get when times are good. Musk kept saying it. On December 17, 2025, he replied to an investor’s post about savings accounts for newborns. He wrote that “there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money.”[2] In the same month as the Paris remark, a longtime basic income writer named Scott Santens published a reply. It is dated May 23, 2024, and it is titled “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income?”[3] His answer, in short: you are arguing about a word. Then, in the spring of 2026, Musk made it less of a word. He wrote that “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”[4] So the phrase is no longer only a slogan. Now it points at a government check. And a check has a size. That is where this piece starts. Why we are doing three jobs at once If you read my earlier piece on robots and checks, you know I asked whether a world of AI abundance is possible, whether people would want it, and whether it could give life meaning. This follow-on does something narrower. I am taking the best-known argument for the idea of “high income” and testing it. There are three tasks here. First, a fact-check: I re-verify Santens’s numbers against independent sources. Second, a historical check: has anyone tried a floor like this before, and what happened? Third, a stress test of the one belief the whole argument stands on. Talk about money and machines can feel exhausting. The numbers are huge, and everyone seems certain. I will name that once and move on. We will go slowly and use plain arithmetic you can check yourself. One note on method. The tool I used returned a structured summary of Santens’s page, not a word-for-word copy. So I quote him only in short pieces. Where I rely on his numbers, I say so, and I re-check them elsewhere. The fact-check, in four tiers I grade each claim in one of four tiers: established fact (verified independently), stale on arrival, oversimplified or conflated, and minor imprecision. Then I give a verdict. Established fact, verified independently The definition. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), founded in 1986, defines basic income as a “periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis.”[5] The definition has no dollar amount. Santens is right about this, and it is the strongest part of his piece.[6] It follows that a $100-a-month check would count, and so would a $100,000-a-year check. Under the definition, “universal high income” is not a rival to basic income. It is basic income with a bigger number. The Musk quotes. Santens lists several Musk statements from late 2023 and 2024. The May 2024 Paris remark is confirmed by Fox Business.[1] A Fortune report dated November 6, 2023 is consistent with the earlier quotes. I saw its headline in search but did not open the page.[7] His poverty-line math is internally consistent. He says the poverty line is $1,255 a month and is about 18% of U.S. GDP per capita. GDP per capita means the country’s total output divided by its people. He uses about $6,900 a month for it.[8] Check: $1,255 × 12 is $15,060 a year. His GDP figure × 12 is $82,800. And $15,060 ÷ $82,800 is 18.2%. The numbers hold together. (The $15,060 matches the 2024 federal poverty guideline for one person, from my own training knowledge. I did not re-check that page live.)[9] Stale on arrival, or stale since His article is dated May 23, 2024. As I write, that is about 28 months ago. Three things have moved. The economy grew. The St. Louis Fed’s series puts 2025 U.S. GDP per capita at $89,962, which is about $7,497 a month.[10] That is 8.6% above his figure. Against it, his $15,000 adult check is now 16.7% of GDP per capita, not 18%. An “18% line” today would be about $16,200 a year. A “25% starting point” would be about $22,500 a year. The evidence arrived. The big OpenResearch experiment was published in July 2024 and revised in September 2025. It came out after his piece. I cover it below.[11] Musk’s claim got more concrete. In 2024 it was a slogan. By May 2026 it was a stated policy: federal checks, long-term, with no inflation.[12] Santens answered the slogan. The policy is different. On the poverty facts as of now: the official U.S. poverty rate for 2024 was 10.6%, about 35.9 million people. The Census Bureau’s supplemental measure, which counts benefits and taxes, was 12.9%.[13] Oversimplified or conflated 1. Definition versus feasibility. This is the central conflation. Santens shows that the word has no price tag. That is true. But a word with no price tag cannot tell you what a country can pay. A reader can leave his piece thinking the “high” question is settled. It is not. It has moved from vocabulary to arithmetic, and the arithmetic needs checking. 2. The cost of his own example. He gives $15,000 a year per adult and $5,000 per child, and says this “would virtually abolish poverty.” Here is the gross cost. About 260 million American adults × $15,000 is $3.9 trillion.[14] About 70 million children × $5,000 is roughly $0.35 trillion. (The child count is my estimate from training data, not a live-checked figure.) Together, about $4.25 trillion a year. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent about $7.0 trillion and collected about $5.2 trillion.[15] The deficit was about $1.8 trillion.[16] So his example costs roughly 60% of everything Washington spends, and about 80% of everything it collects. Now his “starting point” of 25% of GDP per capita, which is about $22,500 each. For adults only, that is about $5.8 trillion. That is more than the government’s total 2025 revenue. For every person, at about 340 million people (my approximation), it is about $7.6 trillion. That is more than total federal spending. 3. “Gross” is not “net.” Here I owe Santens a fair point. A check that goes out and comes back in higher taxes is not a real cost to that household. The true burden is the net transfer, from people who pay more than they get to people who get more than they pay. That is smaller than $4.25 trillion. But it is not zero. Someone is a net payer, and his piece names the payers only in a phrase: billionaires, their corporations, and replaced welfare programs. 4. “Tax billionaires” confuses a stock with a flow. Wealth is a stock, a pile that exists once. A basic income is a flow, owed every year. You can tax a pile once. You cannot spend it every year. A yearly wealth tax or a tax on corporate profits could fund a flow. His piece does not say which, or at what rate. Other critics raise the same concern from different directions. Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities argued in 2016 that a UBI funded by trimming targeted programs could raise poverty.[17] A 2017 OECD analysis, as summarized by the outlet InsideHook (a secondary source, so treat it as an interpretation), found poverty would rise slightly in three of four countries if existing benefits were converted into a flat payment.[18] 5. The 1970s counterfactual is unverified here. Santens cites a RAND working paper saying a small UBI that began in the 1970s and grew with productivity would have been $1,144 a month in 2020. He also cites a Time article about $50 trillion in “new wealth” that went mostly to the top 1%.[19] I could not open the RAND paper in this session. So I treat both as a speculative counterfactual, not an established fact. A “what if” about the past is not a measurement. Minor imprecision “Virtually abolish poverty.” A single adult with no other income who gets $15,000 ends up $60 short of the $15,060 line he himself uses. “Virtually” is fair. But “immediately” is a stretch if the money comes from other benefits. “The theoretical limit is 100% of GDP per capita.” GDP includes things people cannot spend as income, like money set aside for replacing worn-out machines and for government purchases. The true ceiling is lower. (I did not look up the exact shares.) The Van Parijs number. Santens credits the 25% starting point to Philippe Van Parijs’s 1995 book, Real Freedom for All.[20] The book is real. I could not confirm the 25% figure in the text, so I only know it as Santens’s attribution. Overall verdict Santens wins the argument he chose. The word “basic” does not mean “small.” “Universal high income” is not a separate idea. Musk’s contrast between the two is, in plain terms, a false one. But he leaves the harder question mostly untouched, and that question is the one a reader needs answered. At the size he suggests, the yearly bill is somewhere between about 60% of the whole federal budget and more than all of it. His piece gives no funding mechanism beyond a sentence. It also says nothing, in the version I could examine, about prices, about what the check does to work, or about who controls the AI that produces the wealth. The definition is solid. The case for feasibility is thin. And his own numbers are now two years old. Has anyone tried this? Three precedents I looked for historical cases where a society set a income floor, and for each I ask where it holds and where it breaks. (These come from my training knowledge, not live searches. Treat them as well-known history rather than freshly verified facts.) Speenhamland, England, 1795. In May 1795, magistrates in Berkshire adopted a scale that topped up wages according to the price of bread and the size of a family. Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation (1944), argued it trapped workers and lowered wages.[21] Later historians, such as Fred Block and Margaret Somers, argue the system was less harmful and less widespread than Polanyi claimed.[22] Where it holds: a floor tied to wages can turn into a subsidy for employers. Where it breaks: a UBI is universal and not tied to wages. What it suggests, cautiously: the design of a floor matters as much as its size. Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, United States, 1969–1972. President Nixon proposed a guaranteed minimum income for families with children. It passed the House but died in the Senate. Sociologist-turned-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who helped write it, told the story in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973).[23] Experiments around the same time found modest work reductions. Where it holds: Santens says a basic income should have started in the 1970s. This history shows it nearly did. The barrier was politics, not arithmetic, and that supports his point. Where it breaks: the plan was means-tested and small, not universal. What it suggests: the amount gets fought out in a legislature, not settled by a definition. Mincome, Manitoba, Canada, 1974–1979. The town of Dauphin ran a guaranteed annual income for several years. Researcher Evelyn Forget analyzed the records decades later in a 2011 paper.[24] Where it holds: experiments can produce evidence even when politics moves on. Where it breaks: a small town is not a national economy, and prices in one town tell us little about prices everywhere. What it suggests: the data may exist long before anyone acts on it. Three structured analytic techniques Analysts use structured techniques to catch their own motivated reasoning. Here are three. Devil’s Advocacy: the best case for Santens What it is and why it matters: I argue the strongest good-faith case against my own critique. Santens could answer: “I never proposed $22,500 for everyone. I argued about a definition. Every funding objection applies to any program, at any size. The real question is what share of output goes to a floor. The U.S. already moves trillions through taxes and transfers every year. The net cost is much less than the gross. A floor can start small and rise as productivity rises, which is what I proposed.” That is a strong reply. It holds if three things are true. The floor starts small. The amount really does rise with productivity. And someone actually collects that productivity as tax revenue. My critique is not that the idea is impossible. It is that these three conditions are carrying the whole argument, and the piece does not show they will be met. Indicators and Warning: what would tell us which way this is going What it is and why it matters: instead of guessing, I list signs you can watch for. Labor’s share of national income. If it falls steadily while profits rise, the funding base is shifting from wages to capital. That strengthens the case for a dividend on capital. Entry-level hiring. If jobs for young college graduates fall sharply, demand for a floor will rise fast. Productivity growth. If it stays flat, the “abundance” in “high income” is not arriving, and a high floor cannot be paid for. A dollar figure in a bill. Watch for the first serious legislative proposal with an amount, a cost, and a funding source. Until then, it is a slogan. Prices of what people actually need, like housing and care. If they rise faster than the check, the check is worth less than it looks. What-If / Alternative Futures What it is and why it matters: I sketch three plausible paths and what would have to be true for each. These are scenarios, not forecasts. Floor first, then a ratchet (plausible). A modest payment, perhaps a few hundred to a thousand dollars a month, starts and grows with each budget. It requires a durable political coalition. The Alaska case, below, shows that coalitions can form but amounts shift year to year. A capital dividend (possible). The public owns a share of AI-driven profits and pays out a yearly dividend, like a sovereign wealth fund. It requires laws that give the public a real ownership stake before the profits become huge. Checks without a floor of rights (possible, and worrying). Payments exist but are conditional, adjustable, or tied to behavior. The person who sets the amount holds power over the people who receive it. This echoes the earlier question: should a handful of tech companies decide how we live? None is certain. Which one we get depends mostly on choices people make in the next decade, not on what the technology does. An outside-the-box lens: Baumol’s cost disease What it is: In 1966, economists William Baumol and William Bowen noticed something odd in their study of the performing arts. A string quartet needs the same four musicians and the same forty minutes it did a century ago. Factories get more productive, so their goods get cheaper. But live services that need human time do not, so they get relatively more expensive.[25] What it reveals: Suppose AI makes goods and software almost free. A “high income” could still buy less of what people care about most, like housing in a good place, childcare, elder care, and a human teacher. Those prices may keep rising. So the question “how big is the check?” is incomplete. We also need to ask, “what will the check buy?” Where it breaks down: AI may also automate parts of care, teaching, and design. If it does, the effect shrinks. And land, which is limited, is a separate problem from labor. The lens points to a risk. It does not prove it. Testing the load-bearing assumption The assumption: The amount of a basic income is a free political choice, so “high” is just a setting on a dial. Where it comes from. BIEN’s 1986 definition leaves out the amount on purpose.[26] The “25% of GDP per capita” rule is credited to Van Parijs (1995). Santens’s contribution is to argue the dial can be turned up as automation increases. Musk’s slogan, “high, not basic,” is the popular version, and a flattened one. Where it holds. Look at Alaska. Since 1982 the state has paid every resident a yearly dividend from its oil fund. In 2025 the amount was $1,000, set by the Alaska Legislature in House Bill 53, for more than 600,000 eligible Alaskans.[27] The amount is plainly a political choice, and it changes from year to year. In that sense the dial is real. Where it fails. A dial has stops. Alaska’s $1,000 is about 1% of U.S. GDP per capita. Santens’s $15,000 is 15 times that. His 25% starting point is about 22 times it. And the dial is also pushed by behavior. In the OpenResearch experiment, 1,000 low-income adults in Texas and Illinois received $1,000 a month for three years, against a control group on $50. Their individual income from other sources fell by about $1,800 a year. That is about 15 cents for each dollar received. Labor force participation fell 3.9 percentage points. People cut work by about one to two hours a week, and their partners did about the same. Time spent on leisure rose the most. Well-being gains appeared in the first year and then faded.[11] Santens could fairly answer that this was not a true UBI. It was not universal, it lasted only three years, and it was aimed at the low-income. That is correct, and it limits what we can conclude. The same limits apply to pilot results used to support the idea. The conditional answer. The definition is right: “high” is a matter of degree, and it can be called basic income. But the dial is not free. It turns up only to the extent that (a) output really surges, (b) the public captures a share of it as revenue, and (c) prices for what people need do not eat the check. If those three hold, the dial can move a long way. If they do not, “high income” is a promise the arithmetic cannot keep. Two objections, answered Objection one: “You are attacking a straw man; he never proposed $22,500.” I used his own example, $15,000 and $5,000, and his own “sweet spot” of 25%. I also granted that gross cost overstates the burden. My point stands on the net: someone has to pay it, and the piece does not say who. Objection two: “Pilots do not capture what a universal program would do.” True. That cuts both ways. A small trial cannot show a labor drop at national scale, and it cannot show no inflation at national scale either. This is exactly why the inflation question, which Musk answers with “none,” is still open. What is missing from the argument Santens’s piece, as far as I could examine it, does not address four questions. They are the same questions the earlier article asked. Meaning. Work gives many people structure, status, and connection. Psychologist Marie Jahoda argued in 1982 that jobs supply hidden benefits beyond pay.[28] A check replaces income. It does not obviously replace those benefits. Who decides. If a few firms own the AI, the check depends on the goodwill and the tax laws that follow. This is why Gar Alperovitz’s idea of a shared “technological inheritance,” which Santens cites, deserves more attention than the amount. It frames the check as a right, not a favor.[29] Funding. A number, a tax, and a timeline. Prices. A check is only as good as what it buys. Ripple effects Of the issue itself: The word fight may crowd out the money fight. Debating “basic versus high” can feel like progress while skipping the question of the amount and who pays. Likely. The tax base may shift. Payroll taxes help fund Social Security and Medicare. If wages fall as a share of income, that base shrinks. Plausible, not yet shown. Of the proposed solutions: A visible yearly dividend can build a political constituency. Alaska’s has lasted decades. Well documented. A high floor can nudge people toward leisure. The U.S. pilot saw a measurable but modest pull. Whether that is good or bad depends on what people do with the time. Documented in a pilot, uncertain at scale. What is already working The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. The closest thing to a working universal check in the U.S. It is small ($1,000 in 2025) but it is real, paid to over 600,000 people.[27] GiveDirectly’s long-running basic income in Kenya. Economists Dennis Egger and colleagues studied large cash transfers to villages and reported a local boost to the economy, with little rise in prices.[30] This speaks directly to the inflation question, though villages differ from a rich nation. (From my training knowledge, not live-checked.) Stockton, California’s SEED program, which gave 125 residents $500 a month for two years, with evaluators reporting gains in employment and wellbeing. It was a pilot, and small.[31] The OpenResearch study, valuable precisely because it found things advocates did not hope for. Honest evidence is a solution too.[11] Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, a public stake in the proceeds of national resources, which shows how a nation can own a share of an income stream.[32] Something you can do today Whenever you hear a claim about “basic income” or “high income,” ask three questions: How much a month? What does that cost a year? Who pays? If the answer has no number, it is a slogan. Ask your representatives or candidates these same questions, and share your result with someone who says “AI will just pay for everything.” A closing thought In Alaska, the amount of the check is decided by lawmakers, year by year. In 2025 it was $1,000. Next year it may be different. That is the quiet lesson inside this whole debate. The word does not set the amount. People do. Santens is right that “high” is just a bigger number. What he leaves open, and what Musk leaves open, is who gets to choose that number, and what the rest of us are doing with our days while we wait for the check. A floor can give people time. It cannot, by itself, tell them what the time is for. 3-Minute Summary Elon Musk says AI will bring “universal high income, not basic.” In May 2024, Scott Santens replied that this is a false contrast: basic income has no set amount, so “high” is just a larger version. By the Basic Income Earth Network’s definition, he is right. But the definition does not settle feasibility. Santens’s own example, $15,000 per adult and $5,000 per child, costs roughly $4.25 trillion a year, about 60% of the $7.0 trillion the U.S. federal government spent in 2025. His 25%-of-GDP-per-capita starting point would cost $5.8 to $7.6 trillion. Gross cost overstates the true burden, because much of it returns as taxes. But someone is a net payer, and the piece does not say who. His data is now stale: GDP per capita rose about 8.6%, Musk’s claim became a policy position, and the OpenResearch study, published after his piece, found modest drops in work and income from other sources. The real gaps are the ones from the earlier article: funding, prices, meaning, and who controls the AI. Verdict: right about the word, thin on the money. Something You Can Share “‘High’ income is just basic income with a bigger number. So ask the only questions that matter: how much a month, what does it cost a year, and who pays?” About this Analysis Original source analyzed: Scott Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income? (UBI/UHI Amount),” scottsantens.com, May 23, 2024. https://www.scottsantens.com/universal-basic-income-or-universal-high-income-ubi-uhi-amount/ Date written: October 10, 2026. Model: claude-sonnet-5-5 (Claude Sonnet 5.5) was the configured model. The model actually serving a session can differ, so treat the version as approximate. Knowledge cutoff: end of June 2026. Verified by live search or page fetch in this session: the Santens page (as a structured summary, not full text); the BIEN FAQ definition; Fox Business on Musk’s remarks; the BIEN news item of May 24, 2026; the Census 2024 poverty release; the FRED GDP-per-capita series; the CBO FY2025 deficit; the FY2025 outlay and revenue totals via the American Action Forum; the Bleeding Heart Libertarians excerpt ($3.1 trillion for $1,000 a month); Greenstein’s CBPP post; the InsideHook summary of the OECD study; the NBER OpenResearch working paper; and the Alaska 2025 dividend announcement. Drawn from training data (not re-verified live): the 2024 federal poverty guideline figures; the child population estimate; U.S. population; Van Parijs 1995; the RAND and Time claims (not opened); Speenhamland, Nixon’s FAP, and Mincome; Baumol and Bowen; Jahoda; the Kenya and Stockton studies; Norway’s fund; Alperovitz. Notes Fox Business, “Musk predicts AI will create ‘universal high income’ and make saving money unnecessary,” accessed October 10, 2026. Fox Business, “Musk predicts AI will create ‘universal high income,’” reporting Musk’s December 17, 2025 post on X. Scott Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income? (UBI/UHI Amount),” scottsantens.com, May 23, 2024. Faiz Siddiqui, as summarized in “AI leaders see mass job loss coming; they want governments’ help solving it,” Basic Income Earth Network news, May 24, 2026. Basic Income Earth Network, “FAQs.” Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income?” Fortune, “Elon Musk, artificial intelligence, universal income, jobs,” November 6, 2023 (headline seen in search; page not opened). Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income?” (figures: $1,255 a month, 18%, about $6,900 a month). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE, “Poverty Guidelines” (2024 figure from training knowledge; not live-checked). U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis via FRED, “Gross domestic product per capita (A939RC0A052NBEA),” last updated April 9, 2026. Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander W. Bartik, David E. Broockman, Patrick Krause, and Sarah Miller, The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States, NBER Working Paper 32719 (July 2024; rev. September 2025). Siddiqui, “AI leaders see mass job loss coming,” BIEN news, May 24, 2026. U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States: 2024, Report P60-287 (2025). “Four Arguments Against a UBI,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Substack); the page excerpt shows no author or date, and it says about 260 million U.S. adults and $3.1 trillion for $1,000 a month. American Action Forum, “U.S. Treasury: FY 2025 Deficit Totaled $1.8 Trillion” (about $7.0 trillion outlays, $5.2 trillion receipts). Congressional Budget Office, “Monthly Budget Review: Summary for Fiscal Year 2025.” Robert Greenstein, “Greenstein on Universal Basic Income,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 31, 2016 (note added March 12, 2024). InsideHook, “Universal Basic Income Could Make Poverty Worse, OECD Study Finds,” June 8, 2017 (secondary summary of OECD work). Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income?” (citing RAND working paper WRA516-1 and Time, “$50 trillion”); the cited sources were not independently opened. Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944). Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (New York: Random House, 1973). Evelyn L. Forget, “The Town with No Poverty,” Canadian Public Policy 37, no. 3 (2011). William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966). Basic Income Earth Network, “FAQs.” Alaska Department of Revenue, “Department of Revenue Announces 2025 Permanent Fund Dividend Amount,” September 22, 2025. Marie Jahoda, Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Gar Alperovitz, “Technological Inheritance and the Case for a Basic Income,” Medium. Dennis Egger, Johannes Haushofer, Edward Miguel, Paul Niehaus, and Michael Walker, “General Equilibrium Effects of Cash Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Kenya,” Econometrica 90, no. 6 (2022) (from training knowledge). Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), evaluation reports, 2021 (from training knowledge). Norges Bank Investment Management, “Government Pension Fund Global” (from training knowledge). Sources & Further Reading Scott Santens, “Universal Basic Income or Universal High Income? (UBI/UHI Amount)”: https://www.scottsantens.com/universal-basic-income-or-universal-high-income-ubi-uhi-amount/ Basic Income Earth Network, FAQs: https://basicincome.org/faqs/ Basic Income Earth Network, “AI leaders see mass job loss coming; they want governments’ help solving it” (May 24, 2026): https://basicincome.org/news/2026/05/ai-leaders-see-mass-job-loss-coming-they-want-governments-help-solving-it/ Fox Business, “Musk predicts AI will create ‘universal high income’ and make saving money unnecessary”: https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/musk-predicts-ai-create-universal-high-income-make-saving-money-unnecessary Fortune, Nov. 6, 2023: https://www.fortune.com/2023/11/06/elon-musk-ai-artificial-intelligence-universal-income-jobs U.S. Census Bureau, Poverty in the United States: 2024: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.html FRED, GDP per capita: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RC0A052NBEA CBO, Monthly Budget Review, FY2025: https://cbo.gov/publication/61307 American Action Forum, FY2025 Treasury results: https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/u-s-treasury-fy-2025-deficit-totaled-1-8-trillion/ “Four Arguments Against a UBI,” Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Bleeding Heart LibertarianFour Arguments Against a UBIIn my last post, I discussed six arguments that are often made in support of a UBI. Here, as promised, is the next chapter from Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, which covers the four main arguments against a UBI. As before, the purpose of this chapter is just to lay the arguments out in relatively succinct form. We cover each of them…Read more3 years ago · 5 likes · Matt Zwolinski CBPP, Greenstein on Universal Basic Income: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/greenstein-on-universal-basic-income InsideHook on the OECD study: https://www.insidehook.com/culture/universal-basic-income-make-poverty-worse-oecd-study-says/amp NBER Working Paper 32719 (OpenResearch): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32719/revisions/w32719.rev2.pdf Alaska Department of Revenue, 2025 PFD: https://dor.alaska.gov/department-of-revenue/news-detail/2025/09/22/department-of-revenue-announces-2025-permanent-fund-dividend-amount RAND working paper WRA516-1 (cited by Santens; not opened): https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html HHS/ASPE Poverty Guidelines: https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines Alperovitz, “Technological Inheritance and the Case for a Basic Income”: https://medium.com/@GarAlperovitz/technological-inheritance-and-the-case-for-a-basic-income-ded373a69c8e