ObjectivityIncarnate

practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants.

But it’d be temporary for it to be that high, no? Am I misremembering, or is this basically the way that NYC stopped being so infamously crime-ridden? I was under the impression that it’s not as aggressive now as it was then.

Hastily-googled, but this seems to confirm at least some of what I remember reading a while back: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/what-reduced-crime-new-york-city

I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.

Yeah, probably. Was just wondering about it hypothetically.

After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?

You might want to do some more research and have sources.

I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:

• $1000/mo x 12 months in a year = $12000/yr
• Number of working-age (16-64) Americans = ~210 million (I rounded down to 200 and counted working-age only (i.e. no elderly/retired), two things that make my argument WEAKER)
• $12 thousand x 200 million = $2.4 trillion
• Combined net worth of US billionaires is ~4.5 trillion. But hey, I found a much higher estimate that puts it a bit above 6 trillion. That gets you almost a whole extra year!
• Latest US defense spending budget is $850 billion

Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you’re left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.

The only thing ‘wonky’ is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.

P.S. Telling me to “look at really good sources” for ‘it’s not universal if it’s not given to everyone’ made me laugh pretty hard.

Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.?

Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don’t, will cost even more. That’s one of the main upsides of UBI–no means testing makes it have practically no ‘overhead’. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.

Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.

I mean, it’s completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It’s already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what’s unclear. People saying “nobody will work” are definitely wrong, though, lol.

It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.

Small point about this in particular, but isn’t the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the “other neighborhoods”, too, then?

Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:

the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment.

Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.

It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone. Until then, it’s just another targeted welfare program, “offered to a select portion of a city’s population instead of all residents”, as your link says.

You can’t say UBI has been “proven mostly successful” without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.

Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can’t), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I’ve seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.