Good morning everyone! :D
I've been seeing this video going around and figure'd I'd give my thoughts on it.
Here's the video
He's being given an honorary degree: Doctor of Laws
I had no clue what that was, so I looked it up:
In the United States, Legum Doctor (LL.D.) is granted only as an honorary degree. Two other degrees in law are referred to as "Doctor of Law". Juris Doctor or (Doctor of Jurisprudence) (J.D.) is the professional degree for lawyers and replaced the name Bachelor of Laws in the 20th century aafter law schools began to require a Bachelor of Arts degree before beginning the study of law. While some lawyers claim it is equivalent to research doctorates such as the Ph.D., academics in other fields dispute this on the grounds that no dissertation is required and that most law schools did not make significant curricular changes before changing the name of the degree. Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) is the research doctorate in law, and as such it is generally accepted as comparable to the more commonly awarded research doctorate, the Ph.D.
Hot dang.
That's not bad for a drop-out!!
Universal Basic Income
So, Zuckerberg wants people to be unafraid to fail, and that's a commendable principal which I endorse -- in fact, I would like it if people were so unafraid to fail that they were eager to fail.
People who can roll failure off their shoulder and move on to the next thing are so robust that they cannot help but eventually succeed. And a population full of such people would be a powerful one indeed.
However, Mark is talking about erasing the fear of failure by having a Basic Income.
If you're not familiar with Basic Income, its "a form of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere." link
In other words, a multi-billionaire wants tax payers to subsidize the lives of everyone in the country. lol
I did some basic math
If Zuckerberg wanted to voluntarily subsidize the lives of Americans, and we used the estimated value of Facebook as the source of funds, here's how much everyone would get.
- Worth of Facebook: $234 Billion By 2015 Business Insider
divided by - US Population: 326,243,275 (it updates every second -- worldometers.info)
equals - $717.25 per person
That's not very much. $717.25 per person, one time, at the cost of completely liquidating and distributing Facbook.
Doesn't seem like a good deal for Facebook.
So, what would it cost?
If we wanted to give each person in the US a basic income of $2,500 per month, which would be an annual income of $30k per year, this is what it would look like.
population x wage = cost
326,243,275 x 2,500 = 815,608,187,500
- That's $815.6 billion
If we want the yearly cost, just multiply by 12
- $9,787,298,250,000
According to usgovernmentrevenue.com
| Fiscal Year | Federal Revenue | State Revenue | Local Revenue | Total Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $3.25 trillion | $1.60 trillion | $1.27 trillion | $6.12 trillion |
| 2016 | $3.27 trillion | $1.71 trillion | $1.32 trillion | $6.30 trillion |
| 2017 | $3.46 trillion | $1.74 trillion | $1.36 trillion | $6.56 trillion |
| 2018 | $3.64 trillion | $1.80 trillion | $1.40 trillion | $6.85 trillion |
So if we were to take the total projected tax revenue of US 2018 and subtracted that from the cost of a basic income program, we would have
- 9,787,298,250,000 - 6,850,000,000,000 = 2,937,298,250,000
meaning...
- We come up $2.937 trillion short
Maybe Harvard should take back that honorary doctorate...
What do you think?
Do you have some thoughts on Basic Income or even Mark Zuckerberg that I didn't cover here?
Tell me about it in the comments.
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