[ajzinsbwbs]

I hear this argument a lot but it makes no sense to me. Suppose UBI is $12k/year. Then as long as it costs less than $12k to identify a rich person, it’s cheaper to not pay the rich people than to pay everyone.

In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.

I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.

[viklove]

You're forgetting that the citizens of the US are people, not robots. When everyone gets the same treatment, you get a feeling of unity and you don't divide society into "leeches" and "providers" based on who gets UBI and who doesn't. The UBI becomes part of what it means to be American.

Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place. So this statement you made is false:

> This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.

[ajzinsbwbs]

I’m just responding to the common claim that means-testing UBI would be expensive relative to the expenditures of the program (well-illustrated by the quote “appropriating dollars to save pennies“ in the comment I responded to). This is a quantitative question, not a moral one. I don’t think it serves the movement to be making arguments that are obviously wrong if you do a bit of easy research or math, or just think critically about it. It makes the advocacy less credible. Since most people only read comments online and don’t post, you might not normally get any feedback from those who feel this way.

> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.

This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.

[nybble41]

> When everyone gets the same treatment, you get a feeling of unity and you don't divide society into "leeches" and "providers" based on who gets UBI and who doesn't.

No; it may obscure that distinction slightly but it very much still exists. Anyone who receives more in UBI and other desired services than they pay in taxes will remain a "leach". Those who pay more in taxes than they receive are the providers, without whom the whole UBI system could not exist. (The relevant pre-UBI terms are "net tax payer" and "net tax receiver".)

[viklove]

No that's not true at all. Receiving a UBI and using the income to take care of your aging parents makes you a giver, not a leech. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.

[nybble41]

> Receiving a UBI and using the income to take care of your aging parents makes you a giver, not a leech.

No that's not true at all. So what if you're not the only one benefitting from your UBI payments; they're still coming from someone else's effort, not your own. To be a "giver" you first must earn the things you're giving away. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.