The Maths On The UBI Argument

This week’s release of the Sora text-to-video engine has reignited a recent debate. It seems to most well-informed observers that artifical intelligence is going to make a large number of occupations obsolete in a short number of years. This has got people talking about a universal basic income again. So VJM Publishing does the maths.

Let’s say our putative UBI is $385 per week, across 52 weeks, making it just over $20,000 per year. $20,000 times 4 million eligible Kiwis equals $80 billion per year. Where to find that?

There’s one really obvious source of finding half of that money: the existing benefit system. According to budget.govt.nz, existing benefit expenses are some $40 billion per year. A UBI would mean that there was no longer any need to maintain the existing welfare system.

This would also mean that WINZ itself could be completely scrapped. The welfare bureaucracy would no longer have any reason to exist once a UBI was in place. That would save another $3 billion (also as per budget.govt.nz above).

Many will be astonished to hear that WINZ spends about three billion a year just administering benefits. But that is the price of not having a universal income. With no universal income, welfare benefits have to be gatekept to the “truly worthy”. This means at least one WINZ office, usually with dozens of staff, in every major built-up area in the country, to deter the supposed hordes of bludgers.

That’s $43 billion of the $80 billion.

A second area of savings comes from church tax. Although figures for New Zealand are unclear, it’s estimated that Australia is missing out on some AUD10,000,000,000 per annum from not having church taxes. Given that Australia is over five times larger than New Zealand, that suggests that we could bring in at least $2 billion from a church tax.

The only reason why churches are already untaxed in Australia and New Zealand is thanks to an antiquated pre-colonial British law written under the then-common delusion that the Christian religion adds value to society. Now that Christians are a minority in New Zealand, and in the wake of mass Christian opposition to the cannabis referendum, it’s neither necessary nor possible to continue with this delusion.

A $2 billion annual church tax would bring us to $45 billion.

A third area of savings comes from a Georgist-style tax on ground rents. The New Zealand Property Investor’s Federation believes that the total size of the “rental economy” is about $15 billion. That’s fifteen billion dollars earned through sheer extortion, a parasitic form of income-gathering that causes innumerable harms to wider society – and which is otherwise untaxed.

A Georgist-style 80% tax on ground rents would therefore bring in some $12 billion. Perhaps this can be adjusted down to $10 billion on the basis that some of the rental economy consists not only of simple ground rents, but also rent on improvements, which remains untouched by a land tax under Georgist philosophy.

That brings us to $55 billion.

Empty or otherwise landbanked properties comprise a fourth area of savings. According to the Empty Houses Report, there are some 95,000 empty homes in New Zealand. Some of these are being kept empty because of landbanking, some as holiday homes, some as second homes, some as vacant rentals. In any case, if the ground rents of these empty homes were, on average, $500 per week, and if these ground rents were taxed at 80% as per the Georgist principles above, that would bring in another $2 billion, taking our total to $57 billion.

Note that these land taxes entirely avoid taxes on family homes.

New Zealand is one of the only countries in the OECD to not have a capital gains tax, which is a fifth area of savings. The overall effect of this is to stratify society, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. The reasons for New Zealand not already having a capital gains tax are complicated, but they can be summarised as greed making the country a worse place to live.

According to the Tax Working Group, a capital gains tax in New Zealand would bring in some $6 billion per annum ten years after introduction. The vast majority of this money would otherwise be getting hoarded by the people who need it the least. Thus, with a capital gains tax we have accounted for $63 billion of the necessary $80 billion.

Then the rest of the cost of an UBI will be naturally clawed back by the tax system. If the median wage in New Zealand is $31.61 an hour, and if the average worker works 1,369 hours per annum, then the average already-employed person is bringing in some $43,274 per annum already.

Someone receiving $43,274 will pay $6,073 in PAYE, but someone receiving $63,274 will pay $12,002, almost $6,000 per annum more. So if a $20,000 UBI would raise the average worker’s income to $63,274, roughly $6,000 of that would immediately be taxed back. Multiply this by four million workers and you have an extra $24 billion in PAYE.

That would actually take us over the $80 billion by some margin, to $87 billion or so. For maximum efficiency, we might like to introduce a $20,000 tax-free threshold at this point – the logic being that if it costs $20,000 per annum to survive, taxing anyone making less than this is pointless, because it will have to come back to them in the form of government services anyway.

This would cost slightly over $10 billion, i.e. roughly $2,500 in foregone PAYE for each of the four million employed people.

The remaining shortfall can be accounted for by GST intake on increased spending. If the average person spends $5,000 extra per annum on account of their UBI, then some $750 of that will be recouped by the Government in the form of GST. Multiplied by four million workers makes for an extra $3 billion.

In summary, a $90 billion demand for a UBI plus a $20,000 tax-free threshold can be met by scrapping WINZ and the entire welfare system ($43 billion), a church tax ($2 billion), a land tax on the ground rents of rental property ($10 billion), a land tax on empty homes ($2 billion), a capital gains tax ($6 billion), naturally increased PAYE ($24 billion) and naturally increased GST ($3 billion). The numbers for a UBI in New Zealand add up.

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VJMP Predicts 2024

Predicting 2023 at the end of 2022 was fun (you can see how well we did here), so now, at the end of 2023, we will predict 2024.

We predict with great confidence that the general economic position of the average Western worker will continue to decline. This will probably be the major story of 2024 in hindsight. Already Canada, Australia and New Zealand are facing housing crises of unprecedented severity, and record immigration intakes on top of that.

In many places in the Anglosphere, the average worker went backwards in 2023, as 2%+ immigration plus 6%+ inflation minus 3% wage growth (if you’re lucky) means a 5% decrease in per capita income. We predict something similar for 2024 (perhaps with less inflation), i.e. the living standards of the average Anglo to decline by about 5%.

The housing crises in the Anglosphere will lead to the formation of genuine alternative political movements. Already some two-thirds of Canadians have given up on ever owning a home. Until recently, angry sentiments were contained by a belief that the difficulty of buying a first home would eventually return to 1990s levels. That belief is disintegrating, and we predict that this will lead to the appearance of a true alternative to globohomo.

As with previous years, dissent will be kept low by deplatforming anyone who speaks out about the ruling class (we can predict that we won’t be unshadowbanned from Google or FaceBook any time soon). However, in private, people will be seething. Anger at Boomers, in particular, will reach record heights.

We can comfortably predict more cracking down on nationalists in the West, under a variety of pretexts. The firebombing of Tim Lutze’s car on Christmas Eve 2023 presages what’s to come. Anyone dissenting against the globalist narrative will face social and legal pressure and even extra-judicial violence to shut them up. This pressure and violence will become better organised and better funded as time passes.

The quality of popular culture will also decline. The music of 2024 will be best represented by Lizzo. Popular films will mostly be remakes, sequels and adaptations of existing intellectual property. Book readers will become more and more occultist and detached from the wider screen culture. Book reading itself will become a counter-cultural activity.

We will continue to see the alternative media supplant the mainstream. This will be truer of podcasting than of anywhere else. This is where VJM Publishing will be putting much of our effort in 2024. Podcasts will continue to supplant television, especially among younger viewers. The Establishment will keep trying to ban podcasts to protect the mainstream media narratives.

Wars could intensify. We don’t expect China to go for Taiwan yet. But further naval buildup in the South China Sea is all but guaranteed, especially if China doesn’t get their way in the Taiwanese election on January. The alarming rate of Chinese naval production means that they will soon be able to swamp the South China Sea with naval assets.

If Russia defeats Ukraine on the battlefield, which is starting to look likely on account of Ukraine’s resource exhaustion, European countries might make massive investments into the war effort, motivated by the belief that Russia intends to attack further West. While we don’t predict that Russia will go into Poland, an arms buildup in Europe seems very likely.

Gender relations in the West will continue to become more hypergamous. As a result of this, and the economy, more men than ever will drop out of society. Male workplace participation rates will hit all-time lows in Western countries. The “No pussy, no work” phenomenon will become mainstream, even if people aren’t aware of the slogan.

In America, it’s easy to predict the return to power of Donald Trump. The American presidential election will be the high tension point of 2024. If Trump wins, expect widespread rioting from Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, who will be primed to chimp out. Trump may very well get taken out by legal challenges before then.

If the election is disputed to any major extent, we could see the lines of a new American Civil War start to form.

In Europe, it seems like the shift towards nationalism will continue. The Alternativ fuer Deutschland might get banned. If it does, Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-wing nationalist movement will fill much of the gap. This will not solve the problem from the Establishment’s point of view. In fact, the Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht might have an even higher ceiling than the AfD.

In New Zealand, Chris Luxon and the Sixth National Government will plunge to record approval lows, as the New Zealand electorate slowly awakens from its delusion that Jacinda Ardern was responsible for the world economy going down the toilet. Luxon will spend the whole year selling bits of New Zealand off to his mates. Anyone who complains will be dismissed as ‘envious’.

In summary, things are set to get broadly worse, but there are still plenty of opportunities to succeed for those with the right grit.

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Ambassadors Of Weed

The cannabis referendum in 2020 may have failed (even if non-Chinese voters voted in favour of it), but it was close enough that no-one has really complained about the liberal medicinal cannabis regime that the Sixth Labour Government introduced.

It’s now very, very easy to get hold of a medicinal cannabis prescription. There are now numerous outfits that will give you a prescription after a teleconsultation. Some of these might demand that you go through a multi-stage process of first trying CBD oil, then THC oil, before you can first get a prescription for THC flowers. But it’s not a difficult process.

Despite this ease, cannabis is not fully accepted in New Zealand. Decades of Drug War programming has brainwashed hordes of idiots into thinking that cannabis fries brains, causes violence and sexual assaults, and is a gateway to criminality. The truth about cannabis doesn’t matter. The perceptions are what lead to the opposition.

In almost every case where cannabis has become legal (excepting Thailand and a few other places) it only became so after a long struggle. The masses have been brainwashed for so many decades to see cannabis as something evil that changing mass perception is something that can only happen slowly.

Millions of conversations must be had before widespread acceptance of cannabis can exist. This must consist of millions of people hearing from multiple other people each how cannabis helped them, whether medicinally, recreationally or spiritually. And then millions of slow realisations that the government lied about it.

Not only must cannasceptics hear the arguments for cannabis law reform, they must hear them from people they respect if they are to change their opinions.

Whether people accept it or not, human society is status-based. This is how we have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years: in tribes where the higher your status, the higher your chance of surviving and reproducing. Status-seeking and status-judging are as hard-wired into us as sleeping.

Thus, people are more likely to become accepting of something if they see high-status people engaging in it. Status can be hard to judge, but most people realise that polite, happy, pro-social people are higher status than bitter, angry and resentful people.

This essay is an encouragement to all the new legal cannabis users to consider themselves ambassadors of weed.

Many people will not have met a medicinal cannabis user before. So if you can create a polite, happy, pro-social impression on such people, it will normalise in the public consciousness the idea that cannabis users are good people. Let’s not forget, most people who voted no in the cannabis referendum did so because they hated cannabis users.

Some political ambassadors end up representing civilisation among the savages. If you are a cannabis user, this is essentially what you are, among all the pissheads, screen zombies and painkiller addicts. So don’t forget it! Act like you are surrounded by ferals, because you are. Modern drug culture, with its belief in the harmlessness of alcohol and the absolute harm of everything else, is a mass psychosis.

This essay, then, is an encouragement for those with medicinal cannabis prescriptions to act as if they were early traders with cannibal tribes. Try not to shock the natives of Boozelandia too much. They’re superstitious and poorly educated. Try to act in a friendly and understanding manner.

This especially relates to doctors and other medical staff.

If you get a prescription for e.g. Tilray 10:10 oil, such that you are directed to take 1mg every day from a 40mg bottle, then take 1mg every day. Don’t drink half the bottle on the first day and then start hassling the doctor for refills. Holding to the prescribed dose will convince people that it’s possible to use cannabis responsibly without ending up like Trainspotting.

None of this is to say that anyone should use less cannabis or not enjoy it.

Modern Rockefeller medicine has been slow to realise it, but one of the main psychiatric benefits of cannabis is precisely that it gets you high. Being high is the opposite of being low, and being low for too long (so that you get stuck there) is commonly known as depression. Therefore, cannabis is a cure for depression.

I have personally found that cannabis can stop dead all manner of suicidal and/or homicidal ideation, and this is primarily achieved by making you feel good when you would otherwise have felt bad. This sounds straightforward to most people, but it’s still a shock to those who believe that people need to suffer for various reasons of character building/anti-degeneracy/religion/sadism.

Anyone who implies that cannabis is bad because it makes people happy is the sort of authoritarian who ought to be kept far from any decision-making. So, please, enjoy it to the max. As with so many other things, an intelligent balance is necessary.

If New Zealand is ever to step fully into the 21st Century and legalise cannabis, it will first require acceptance of cannabis users by the herd. This will require ambassadors of weed to create that acceptance through positive interactions.

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The Point Of Pushing A Language You Don’t Understand Is To Humiliate You

Most people have noticed all the Boomers getting mad recently about Maori language. Those of us who don’t watch the news have trouble comprehending the extent to which Boomers feel humiliated by non-English language use in mainstream media. The tendency among the young is to laugh in mockery, but there is a sinister agenda behind the control system’s actions.

It’s true that it’s humiliating being spoken to in a language you don’t understand. It feels very much like being a child again, helpless and not respected. It also feels like when you’re out of your depth intellectually, when you are stupid.

In either case, it’s a deeply disempowering and unsettling experience for most people (those of us who have lived in non-English speaking areas for a while usually don’t care, but few are privileged enough to have such an experience). Especially for those old enough to have already developed a grievance about the degree of future shock that modern life placed them under.

However, humiliating the plebs is precisely why the ruling class push languages that aren’t understood.

Theodore Dalrymple once stated that “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.”

The Communists today are now part of Globohomo, the authoritarian Communist-Capitalist alliance that rules over Clown World. The logic of authoritarianism, however, is the same. Just as the schoolyard bully and the domestic tyrant induce submission through abuse, so too does the authoritarian government.

They can’t get away with corporal punishment anymore, so they focus on psychological punishment. Humiliation is the major component of that.

It is always authoritarians who bully people into pronouncing words the way those authoritarians want them pronounced. The libertarian is happy to let people pronounce words different ways, just like they’re happy to let people follow different religions. It’s just culture, part of the rich smorgasbord of life. Not so the authoritarian.

For the authoritarian, it’s always a matter of “respect” that you do what you’re told. You have to kneel down and obey your masters otherwise someone, somewhere, will be disrespected.

The authoritarian puts signs up telling the local people how to pronounce their own street names (see image at top, from outside the Nelson Library). As per the Dalrymple quote, it doesn’t correspond to reality to state that the people who live somewhere don’t know how to pronounce their own streets and neighbourhoods, and that they need to be told by the Government. But stating such absurdities increases the humiliation, so they do it.

The message is that you are too stupid to know how to pronounce your own streets and neighbourhoods. Therefore, you have to be taught the same way you were taught basic life lessons in kindergarten.

The implication is that everything about your culture might prove to be wrong. If you didn’t even know how to pronounce your own street, how can you be sure that free speech is really important?

The undertone is simple: you don’t belong here.

Forcing Maori language serves to remind the majority of New Zealand that this is someone else’s country. No matter how long your ancestors have lived here, you don’t really belong. Therefore, there’s no need to struggle for freedom or dignity. There’s no need to fight to rid New Zealand of political corruption. Just give up!

This is also why the control system tirelessly hounds you about pronouncing words incorrectly. If you have to be told, over and over again, how to pronounce Tauranga correctly, maybe you’re stupid? And, if you’re stupid, maybe the Government should just get on with things without needing your input?

Same deal with putting Maori language first on road signs and the names of Government departments. The whole point of this is not to encourage Maori langauge use. The point is to humiliate and, through humiliation, to induce submission to the ruling class.

None of this is an argument against the Maori language. I agree that te reo is a treasure and that learning to speak it will open up new avenues of thought. I agree that there are concepts in Maori that non-Maoris would benefit from learning. I agree that bilingual children tend to be smarter and have a much easier time learning further languages.

The best way to promote it, however, would be to emphasise such rational and logical arguments without force. That way, there wouldn’t be such a powerful counterreaction to it.

The force, however, is the point, because it humiliates. Humiliation engenders submission, which is the end goal of authoritarians everywhere.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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