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How Do We Pay For This

This is a fair question most people ask, especially with large-scale policies like Ending Homelessness, Oregon-Wide Healthcare, or the Environmental Jobs Program. To guarantee housing as a human right and to eliminate homelessness will cost $35 billion over the next decade. Some of the costs can be outright eliminated because funding that did go into providing ambulance rides, substance abuse treatment, and healthcare because a person did not have a safe place to get clean will make those expenses less prominent if we provide the unsheltered with a home. In Denver, they saw a savings of $2,373 per person due to the reduced use of public services if you give homeless people a place to live. In Portland Oregon, a study saw over a 50% reduction in Medicaid spending and got fairly close to the typical spending of a regular Medicaid user. Now, this is fully paid for by a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of one percent – those couples who have a net worth of at least $32 million. This wealth tax will make Oregon $57 billion in revenue over the course of 10 years. Easily paying for my solution to end homelessness while also providing Universal Childcare and Pre-k, which costs $20 billion over 10 years with $2 billion to spare in case something else needs more funding and also not including savings of other programs because of this policy.
How this works is by a 1 percent tax on net worth above $32 million for a married couple. That means a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000. The tax rate would increase to 2 percent on the net worth from $50 to $250 million, 3 percent from $250 to $500 million, 4 percent from $500 million to $1 billion, 5 percent from $1 to $2.5 billion, 6 percent from $2.5 to $5 billion, 7 percent from $5 to $10 billion, and 8 percent on wealth over $10 billion. These brackets are halved for singles of course.
Now for large items like an Environmental Jobs Program, Universal Basic Income, and Oregon-Wide Healthcare, a wealth tax will not solve these cost issues for these life and planet-saving solutions instead, I would like to talk about the cost for if we do not implement these policies. For example, if we do not implement a policy similar to the Environmental Jobs Program we are expected to have over $300 billion in loss of economic productivity in Oregon over the next 30 years. Or we could not suffer those losses and have an economic and environmental plan that yes is expensive - $210 billion over 10 years if you were wondering. Which I know is going to be very difficult for many people to understand the varsity of what I am asking them to do. But this still saves not only the planet but also $90 billion in economic productivity which is nothing to laugh at.
For Universal Basic Income it could be paid for by a Value Added Tax (VAT) on nonessential items. A VAT is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $200 billion, up to $40 billion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at 3 quarters of the European level would generate $120 billion in new revenue. A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software.
But here's the good news. Some of the policies, like Oregon-Wide Healthcare, save Oregonians lots of money! Over the next ten years, health expenditures for Oregon are projected to total approximately $660 billion here if we keep our current dysfunctional system. According to the Yale study and others, Oregon-Wide Healthcare will save approximately 
$60 billion over that same time period if you scale this down to Oregon's population. However, most importantly we need to acknowledge all the lives that will be saved because of this policy because the worry of health care financially burdening you for your entire life is gone. We will now have more time with the people we love because of one policy. This can be easily financed by using similar tax policies proposed by Bernie Sanders in 2016 to pay for the proposed national form of Oregon-Wide Healthcare, instead of the state kind that I am suggesting.

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Links for the data we used to produce these results for Ending Homelessness:

Links for the data we used to produce these results for Oregon-Wide Healthcare: 

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Disclaimer: Any and all national data used was scaled to Oregon's population with negative expenditures rounded up and savings or positive expenditures rounded down for overall fairness.

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