[jganetsk]

What, in your judgement, makes it not a UBI?

If basic income is X, some of the individuals receiving it will have a tax liability >= X. All legitimate UBI proposals I've ever heard share this property. It's either that, or the government finances the entire UBI with a budget deficit. And no one is seriously proposing that.

There's also minimum guaranteed income... which guarantees that Earned Income + Basic Income - Tax Liability >= Minimum Guaranteed Income, for all individuals. That's a stronger proposal. We should really aim for this.

But I don't think implementing UBI means that everyone is better off the next day. Some people's post-tax income will stay the same or go down.

Another question: do UBI and income tax go together? It would be interesting to see proposals that provide UBI but eliminate income tax, replacing it with some other kind of tax.

[surfmike]

I initially interpreted the parent to say that employed people don't receive UBI. If they do, it is in fact a UBI but then does not get around the cost issue (I comment about that on a sub thread).

[jganetsk]

Absolutely it does get around the cost issue. Someone with no income receives just a UBI. They cost the system $20. Someone with non-zero income recives both a UBI and a higher income tax burden. What net impact does that individual have on the cost of the system? If their income is greater than the UBI... the impact might be zero, or negative.

[surfmike]

Assuming a 40% tax (no idea what it would actually be in practice), everyone earning less than $50 a month would be a net cost.

As a thought experiment, imagine that you increased the UBI payments so that they took up all the gross income of the country. Now your tax rates are 100%, even though the "net impact" of the redistribution is 0. A smaller UBI is the same concept, just the percent of income distributed is smaller. The bigger the UBI, the larger your tax rates on all workers. As those tax rates reduce the supply of labour, the costs mount even more.