An honest attempt at understanding the universal income question in America.

I don’t know how many UBI questions I’ve seen in the last week. What I haven’t seen is anybody actually try to figure it out using the money that is currently in the economy. I'm not sure it's even well defined. Everybody just “knows” what it is, and a lot of people think it’s coming because the tech bros keep abstractly dangling it in front of our faces. This might answer why we haven't seen anyone actually produce anything tangible. It would require a magician and last I checked, the guys we call magicians are really, just good illusionists. That's what UBI looks like to me with actual numbers behind it, an illusion. So I tried. I’m not an economist. I pulled together every piece I could find that’s actually worked somewhere: Alaska’s oil dividend, Norway’s fund, Mexico’s and France’s profit sharing, Canada’s carbon rebate. Then I had AI run it on real company numbers, five years of actual data and then thirty years out. It went through four rounds of checking across Claude Opus 5.5, GPT Astra 6.0, Gemini Argon 4 and Muse Wonder, and each one caught mistakes the others missed. The idea was simple: everybody owns a piece of everybody’s robot. The public slowly gets a quarter of the 500 biggest companies, everyone gets the same check from what those companies pay out, and it’s locked in so nobody can raid it. Here’s what came back. About $2,000 a person a year, thirty years from now. If AI booms the way they keep promising, maybe $6,000. That’s not UBI. That’s a stimulus check. You can’t live on it, and you sure as hell can’t lose your job to a robot on it. And it’s not because the plan is too timid. The money isn’t there. Even if we owned 100% of the 500 biggest companies, everything they pay all their owners today works out to about $4,600 a person. Every corporation in the country combined makes about $3.7 trillion a year before taxes. A $20,000-a-person UBI would cost about $6.8 trillion. That’s almost twice all corporate profit in America. So when someone tells you UBI is coming, ask them where the money comes from, because I looked and it isn’t there. Not from profits, not at this size. Maybe AI makes everything so cheap that a small check covers it. Maybe someone smarter than me has an answer they haven’t shared. But I don’t know how this works, and something’s got to figure it out, or we’re all gonna get fucked by a group of bad illusionists. Everything is public if you want to check me or prove me wrong. The code: github.com/swensonator1/everybody-owns-a-piece. The full write-up with every source: https://systemsfletcher.substack.com/p/everybody-owns-a-piece-an-honest. Please, tear it apart and find what I missed. I’d love to be wrong.