A wealth tax UBI solves by creating initial consumer demand shifts to green tech, and allows a soft landing for socialism to begin

5 This is especially important when it comes to speculating about the costs of implementing a UBI program in various countries. The cost would be extraordinarily high, but that is only a death sentence for UBI if one assumes relatively similar growth rates as we have today (between roughly 1% and 4% depending on the specific economy or measure). Increased growth combined with a dedicated tax on higher income earners, inheritance, luxury properties (e.g., second and third homes, cars, and/or boats), and investment incomes would likely be enough to pay for a substantial UBI with little negative impact on anyone. Now, relying on the potential for consumer-driven growth is a dangerous proposition for the Left to accept given the planetary harms already done due to the growth-fetishizing economic logic of capitalism. However, if short-term consumer growth, driven by UBI, was channeled through green technologies and processes alongside a corollary demand that existing production be progressively reorganized to meet different consumer demands than the manipulated desires that are produced by capitalism in the same way that the physical products are, it is possible that further ecological damage would be sufficiently mitigated (especially when compared with existing trends). A low-carbon economy is also more likely to be achieved than the zero-carbon economy we need, but it seems reasonable to assume that progress towards a low-carbon economy would make eventually achieving a zero-carbon economy more likely. This is not a speculation or qualification that is rooted in optimism though. The planet and its various inhabitants—especially those already excessively harmed by the existing order—are already between a rock and hard (warm, wet) place. No amount of wishful thinking can change that. Low-carbon consumer growth could create an increase in the tax base large enough to sustain a UBI for a few decades, and it will be in those decades that the broader struggle against capitalism will be waged. It is also important to note that the typical alternative to UBI heralded by the Left is a combination of full employment and a shorter work week (see Daniel Zamora’s “The Case Against a Basic Income,” in Jacobin [Dec. 28, 2017] for a recent iteration of this false alternative). If one is primarily concerned about the ecological impact of a growth economy, full employment and a shorter work week fail to offer any necessarily more feasible path towards a degrowth economy than UBI does. Both would require degrowth as an additional demand. It seems that we are stuck with a growth economy in the short-term, so why not try—as much as possible—to make sure the processes and products of growth are far more equitably shared and democratically-determined? If, however, this consumer growth doesn’t happen, all that will happen is that capitalism will collapse under the weight of the contradiction between the demands of the people for an equitable share of, and say in, the production of the social product and capitalism’s inability to provide that. In this sense, the inability of capitalism to accommodate a UBI for any length of time speaks to the transitional radicalism of the demand itself.