[notahacker]

> Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

You're responding to an entire subthread revolving around the idea that the great benefit of UBI is that it allows adults (except foreign ones) to "find their own amusements and purpose" and avoid "bullshit jobs" and the social acceptability of it as a permanent and exclusive income source...

There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs. I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country, and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

Needless to say, advocates of systems of social assistance not built on the principle that it's entirely unreasonable to ask people to work and/or assess their fitness to do so are not guilty of the same level of staggering hypocrisy when accepting the status quo of work requirements and thresholds imposed on foreigners seeking to enter a country.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You're responding to an entire subthread revolving around the idea that the great benefit of UBI is that it allows adults (except foreign ones) to "find their own amusements and purpose" and avoid "bullshit jobs"

Because that's what a working safety net does. It prevents employers from imposing unreasonable terms on employees when their only alternative is starvation, by making that not the thing that happens if they turn down the job.

> There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

I'm going to describe two systems.

In one there is a UBI of $12,000/year and a flat 30% tax rate. In another there is $12,000/year in cash social assistance with a 20% phase out up to $60,000, a 10% tax up to $60,000 and a 30% tax over $60,000.

These two systems are in fact the same, the only difference is that in the second one when the government takes 20% of each additional dollar you earn they call it "phase out" instead of "tax", which leads people to the mistaken impression that increasing that rate (which applies to lower income people) is a sensible thing to do, even though it is identical to raising taxes on lower income people.

The second system is not "more efficient", it is exactly the same. And anything that doesn't look like that is going to be less efficient.

You can give people non-cash, and then you need an inefficient bureaucracy dedicated to busting people who figure out some way to divert their food assistance money into paying their insurance premiums or similar, and at the same time you create an inefficient barter system where low income people subvert that bureaucracy by converting the things that can be bought with government money back into real cash.

You can try to phase out the UBI, but as above that is completely identical to raising taxes on those people, and imposing high marginal tax rates on lower/middle income people is the poverty trap.

Nothing is going to be more efficient than a UBI because a UBI does exactly the thing it's supposed to do and nothing else. There is no inefficiency to remove.

> The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs

Really it's that if you don't have high phase out rates then you can't make it contingent on working. If two otherwise unemployed people could pay each other self-canceling payments to do each other's laundry or whatever, now they're both "employed". It's trivial to create "employment" between any number of cooperating parties that way. That doesn't happen much now because the government takes most of the "income" from that "employment" in reduction of benefits -- it invokes the poverty trap. If you eliminate the poverty trap but require employment then everyone will magically be "employed" on paper because making money creates eligibility for government benefits rather than reducing them.

And that isn't even fraud -- they really are paying each other and really are doing the thing they're being paid to do. They can even each pay each other to do the thing they each wanted to do to begin with. You don't even need another person -- create a corporation, have it pay you for whatever it is you were doing anyway and then reinvest your "wages" in the company so they have money to pay you again tomorrow. All a work requirement does is create useless inefficiency, paperwork and bureaucracy.

> I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country

To get in under H1B you have to be a qualified specialist. The purpose is to let in people with in-demand skills. None of those jobs are the degrading McJobs that people only take when the alternative is starvation or homelessness, and the people only qualified to do a McJob aren't "required" to do that to immigrate, they aren't eligible to immigrate at all.

> and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

It obviously isn't, because the money that funds the UBI doesn't even come from them, it comes almost entirely from other citizens in the same way that any social assistance money does.

[notahacker]

> You can try to phase out the UBI, but as above that is completely identical to raising taxes on those people, and imposing high marginal tax rates on lower/middle income people is the poverty trap.

> Nothing is going to be more efficient than a UBI because a UBI does exactly the thing it's supposed to do and nothing else. There is no inefficiency to remove.

Nonsense. The former system you've described doesn't pay out to working age economically inactive people, who vastly exceed those claiming employment-linked or disability benefits in every developed country. Unlike your hypothetical example of people paying each other to do each other's laundry, these people actually exist, and needless to say transforming the system to pay out $12000 per annum to tens of millions more largely non-taxpaying people has a net cost orders of magnitude more than state bureaucracy. Most reasonable definitions of efficiency would regard it as less efficient to pay out to millions of people whose actions indicate they don't particularly want the money. (Most reasonable definitions of efficiency would also argue that it's often better to divert some of that cash towards providing additional support to people that can demonstrate a genuine need for support costing >$12000 per annum if purchased from the private sector)

So on practical grounds, it's a much, much more expensive social system than any real or feasible system with a work requirement. If you want to argue that this is justifiable because it's morally imperative that people ought to be free to choose not to work or subject to any form of state assessment unless they're foreign, feel free to make that argument. Just be aware that's the true nature of the argument you're making, and that those UBI dependents' access to the affordable consumer goods (and probably food) on a state stipend is entirely dependent on the rest of the world not being able to afford such a system to retire their own menial workers.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The former system you've described doesn't pay out to working age economically inactive people, who vastly exceed those claiming employment-linked or disability benefits in every developed country.

And what would you do with these people, who have no disability but also no marketable skills and as a result no one will hire them?

A UBI combined with the elimination of the minimum wage would allow more of these people to work, because then they could actually find work for the price the market values their labor (less than current minimum wage).

And it's not like we aren't paying them already. Even after unemployment runs out, in most states they still qualify for food and other social assistance. Because what is the alternative? Watch them starve or turn to crime to eat?

[notahacker]

> And what would you do with these people, who have no disability but also no marketable skills and as a result no one will hire them?

You seem to have difficulties understanding the concept of "economically inactive people", who exist in large numbers even where unemployment never "runs out". Many economically inactive working-age people have plenty of marketable skills, they just prefer to live off savings, inheritances or family/spousal income than claim subsidies contingent on their willingness to demonstrate effort towards seeking and accept an offers of employment. By definition, economically inactive people (including the minority dependent on other forms of state handout because they can't work) are people not looking for work in the near future, and especially not looking for work at less than minimum wage if given a boost to their current standard of living courtesy of the taxpayer.

[AnthonyMouse]

It is not a problem for people who are living off of savings/inheritance/spousal income to receive the UBI because the taxes due on every dollar spent was already paid when it was earned to begin with. It makes no difference that it was last year instead of this year or by a different person who gave it to them. They are no more a problem than people receiving the UBI who are actively working, and if you really want more from them today, fund the UBI with a consumption tax instead of an income tax.

Compensating stay at home parents for their unpaid labor is even an advantage of a UBI that may help to mitigate the problem in first world countries of people having children below the population replacement rate.

At which point we are back to people who are not working but have no money, and the original problem. With no social assistance some of these people would starve. Maybe not all of them, but how do you propose to distinguish them? Especially without rewarding hard-to-detect dishonesty, or having any false negatives that cause those people to starve?

[notahacker]

> It is not a problem for people who are living off of savings/inheritance/spousal income to receive the UBI because the taxes due on every dollar spent was already paid when it was earned to begin with. It makes no difference that it was last year instead of this year or by a different person who gave it to them

Of course it's a problem and of course it makes a difference. The result is that tax take remains unchanged and the burden of paying for additional social assistance goes up. This is a matter of elementary arithmetic; I find it genuinely mindboggling that someone can get this deep into a thread arguing in favour of welfare reform without being able to grasp it.

Sure, you cut that deficit by raising taxes on everyone, but this penalises families with multiple earners and rewards families where only one member needs to work since the new social assistance they get exceeds the increased tax burden on their sole breadwinner. And it's the latter group where that generally has less debt, lower cost of living and/or more of the assets they want already paid for; hence the other family members not seeking work. If you want to avoid giving the impression UBI is robbing the workaholic middle classes to pay for the idle asset-rich, funding it with a consumption tax (even if it were possible, given shifting the tax burden from consumption to income tax implies massive tax breaks to the low propensity-to-consume rich paying the majority of today's tax) is certainly not the way to go.

If you want to incentivise stay-at-home parenting, you create subsidies for stay-at-home parents; there's no need to also subsidise childless people staying at home because they don't actually need the money at the same time.

And then you're talking about assessing "the original problem" of people in danger of starvation as if governments don't already do that: hungry people should either apply for the benefits and demonstrate willingness to apply for jobs that are suggested to them or (they or their carers) should provide certification that they're not mentally or physically capable of work. Of course there are no guarantees against dishonesty, just as there are no guarantees a UBI will not continue to pay dead people. But a few dishonest people risking jail for fraud costs a lot less than paying many people who have no intention of applying for welfare - fraudulently or otherwise - but certainly wouldn't refuse it if it was thrust upon them. If false negatives are a major problem you can skew the government bureaucracy in favour of approving virtually every request and it'd still cost less than indiscriminate payouts. But don't take my word for it: most governments collect statistics on why people not in work are not in work and publish the costs of running their employment departments.