[luckylion]

A "real" test would be much harder, and to be actually useful, it would also have to contain a way to finance itself, i.e. by testing it not on a selected group of people, but on a region and adding additional taxes for everyone in the region large enough to offset the payments.

If you're only testing the outcome, but not the income, you're essentially allowing "free energy" people to plug their magic machines into a wall socket while you test the energy output of their machines.

Much fewer people will agree to run that test (as it'll negatively affect their bottom line), and I do believe that proponents of UBI will also be more hesitant to run it, as it might prove that adding e.g. 20% to income tax will motivate tax payers to migrate away from UBI zones.

[TotempaaltJ]

AFAIK one component of UBI is that you throw out (most of?) the other welfare benefits you might get. By saving money on that, you could potentially offset or even compensate for the required added income tax.

[jfindley]

This sort of thing gets mentioned a lot, but in practice doesn't work. The amount of money spent on welfare benefits[0], plus the cost of the administration, ends up several orders of magnitude less money than UBI wage x Population size. This is the key problem with UBI: making it actually universal costs an unsustainably huge sum of money, and making it not universal just means you've re-invented welfare benefits, but worse.

0: Doesn't really matter which country you choose the results will be the same

[dogma1138]

It’s also important to note that the direct and indirect benefits of traditional welfare are also considerably higher than even the highest suggested UBI allowances.

For example in the UK housing benefits would be greatly dependent on where you live in some London councils housing benefits can be as high as £400 per week, this alone is more than the highest proposed UBI allowances that aim to match the tax free allowance (currently at £12.5K).

UBI with removal of all other benefits could easily mean that the people that need it the most would be getting less and sometimes much less.