What would a basic income guarantee for Argentina cost?
Last year I calculated that a person here could get adequate nutrition for some AR$3 per day, which is probably more like AR$5 now. Housing in the capital costs more; I'm paying AR$1500 per month for my one-bedroom apartment, but an apartment this size could host four people if they got along really well; living in it alone is a "luxury", which I put in quotes because I fucking hate living alone.
I did spend a week and a half late last year in an apartment here in the capital that was AR$300 per person, but the roof leaked badly enough that mushrooms were growing from the ceiling, there were crack dealers downstairs, and getting along with the other roommates and other people who had claims on the place proved impossible — not just for me, but for them as well.
On the other hand, just outside of the capital city, housing costs are a little lower. So the AR$400 or AR$500 per person suggested by the price of my apartment might actually be a little high. Let's say AR$300 per person, or AR$10 per day per person.
Beyond living space and food, what else do you need to survive? Utilities here are inexpensive; here's what I'm paying per month:
| | AR$/month |
| building management services ("expensas") | 200 |
| electricity | 17 |
| ABL | 27 |
| telephone and internet | 162 |
| cellphone, approximately | 50 |
| gas | 22 |
| water | 10 |
| total | 488 |
ABL is a set of city taxes known as "ABL" ("Impuesto Inmobiliario, Alumbrado Barrido, Limpieza, Mantenimiento, y Conservación de Sumideros"). The electricity and water bills come every two months, so the amount on the bill is twice what I've shown above; if someone pays $20 on their water bill, they're paying $10 per month.
The cellphone above is individual, but the other items would be shared with other people if I weren't living alone; they might be a little more expensive with more people (more gas for hot showers, say), but not much. Let's say a bit over 20% with two roommates, plus two more cellphones, rounding off at AR$700 per month, AR$233 per person per month.
In a city, transportation is a necessity rather than a luxury; typical is AR$1.70 for a bus ride twice a day per person, AR$102 per month. You may be able to get by with a bicycle, and a bicycle may actually work better at some times of day, but it's not an option for everyone (like me, when my knee started to hurt a couple of years ago, although it's better now) and the bicycle is not without its own expenses; and transportation is more expensive for some people, particularly once you stray outside the capital; so I'm going to use AR$102 as my estimate of the basic cost of transportation.
That is, the basic expenses come to roughly this:
| | AR$ per person per month |
| food | 150 |
| housing | 300 |
| utilities | 233 |
| transportation | 102 |
| total | 785 |
There are people who live on less than AR$800 per month, but it's difficult and risky; there are always unplanned expenses. For example, I was very grateful to have AR$30 for antibiotics earlier this week when I came down with an unplanned kidney infection. A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have.
On the other hand, it seems like an AR$800/month/person basic income guarantee would be enough to nearly eliminate material insecurity. Right now that's about US$95, or US$150 at the official exchange rate. Per year, it would be about US$1800 per person, using the official rate. Argentina's per-capita GDP is about US$10600 nominal, so this is about 17% of GDP. Current population is about 41 million people, and the official government budget (not counting the difference between the official and unofficial exchange rates, which amounts to a heavy export tariff on legal exports) is about US$113 billion per year, US$2800 per person per year, or US$233 per person per month.
Providing a universal basic income, then, would cost about 64% of the current government budget, 17% of the total GDP. But it would subsume certain existing government programs --- for example, there's already a limited basic-income program called the Asignación Universal por Hijo, which only applies to minor children, only to 30% of them, and provides much less than the AR$800 I'm arguing is necessary.
I think the US$40B budget of ANSeS, the National Social Security Administration, is a good estimate of the size of the government programs that would be replaced; ANSeS's budget includes the AUH, the pensions of basically everybody (since the 2008 nationalization of the private pension funds), maternity leave, and so on. There might be some programs within the ambit of ANSeS that would not be replaced by a basic income, but there are also housing and healthcare subsidy programs which could possibly be replaced with a basic income which are not part of ANSeS.
So if we replaced an ANSeS-sized chunk of the budget with a basic-income program that paid US$1800 per person per year, and whose administrative costs were an additional 10%, we'd add only US$42 billion per year to the national budget — US$1010 per capita, a 37% increase from its current level:
| | US$/year/person |
| basic income | 1800 |
| total expense of basic income guarantee program | 1980 |
| cost of ANSeS | -970 |
| net tax increase from replacing ANSeS with BIG | 1010 |
| current total national government revenues | 2700 |
On the other hand, this might be unrealistic; in particular, I think most pensioners need quite a bit more than AR$800 per month, something like twice that, and they're not as flexible as younger people — working for extra money, or moving in with roommates, is very difficult for many of them, and they have medical expenses younger people don't. So you might not be able to replace pensions entirely with a basic-income guarantee. You might need to allocate an extra AR$1000 per month to each of the 5 million retirees, an additional AR$5B or US$1B per month, US$12B/year; and there might be a need for other programs along these lines.
But it does seem like the magnitude of the expenditure would be manageable within the context of a modern society like Argentina, if nontrivial. Politically, however, it seems impossible at the moment, since even the modest AUH attracts heavy criticism, along the usual welfare-queen lines.