Economically illiterate Joe Rogan advocates for Universal Basic Income... again

Or how 3 people in a room with computers can't do arithmetic

A few days ago I watched this pretty entertaining (and at times informative) show with Joe Rogan and Billy Carson.

Billy Carson seems a lot like an Alex Jones character. He makes a bunch of wild claims, some of which can be substantiated and some of which are completely made up; yet he shows little to no distinction between the two when making them. It’s one of those situations where you have to keep a browser tab open to fact check what they’re saying as they say it. Entertaining and informative, but also pretty exhausting.

While the show was largely focused on theories about ancient aliens and Sumerian tablets, at one point towards the end of the show they started talking about how AI would eventually make everyone unemployed and how the government should provide UBI - Universal Basic Income, for every American adult to compensate for this.

The video above goes straight to this segment. Joe Rogan suggests a very generous $200,000 base annual paycheck for every adult in the country. It’s easy to be generous with other people’s money, isn’t it Joe?

He then asks what it would cost to provide 200 million adults with that paycheck per year.

Joe Rogan, his assistant, and his guest, all spend several minutes trying to multiply $200,000 x 200,000,000 and end up with a figure of $40 billion. The actual figure is of course much higher, at $40 trillion. They’re off by 3 orders of magnitude, or 1,000.

Now, people make mistakes, I get it. But it is simple arithmetic (you just multiply 2x2 and then add up the zeroes), and they do have calculators on their phones.

The funny thing is they then claim that the U.S. aid to Ukraine (which I think is a travesty, by the way), which they researched and found was around $175 billion to date, was way more than that, so if only the U.S. government had used some of this money to give everyone a paycheck of $200k, they would have solved poverty.

The fact that nobody in the room paused and said “Hold on, that doesn’t sound right” is telling.

In actuality, the entire U.S. government budget is about 10 times less than what it would need to be to fund such an insanely expensive program.

Moreover, the entire U.S. GDP, everything made in the entire country, was around $27 trillion in 2023. Still $13 trillion short of being able to afford to pay each adult in the U.S. a staggering $200k.

Put another way, U.S. GDP per capita, the number you get when you divide GDP by all the people (not just adults) living in the country, is around $76k. No country has a GDP per capita much higher than that.

Their proposed UBI paycheck is literally more than the entire productive capacity of the country.

I like Joe, I think he invites interesting guests every now and then and goes outside the mainstream to bring out intellectuals with valuable things to say. I also appreciate that he didn’t buy into the COVID narrative.

But spreading this kind of… dare I say it, disinformation; and just the base economic illiteracy going on here is quite irresponsible. We already have enough of a problem with socialist and communist thinking pervading every facet of our lives. We don’t need Joe trotting out insane ideas based on shoddy math on top of that.