[jlokier]

The niece couldn't take the better paying job due to a "cliff" - the abrupt loss of food stamps due to a tiny increase in income.

If it was gradual withdrawal rather than a cliff, she could afford to take the job.

The UK's Universal Credit is supposed to be gradual and therefore work out to everyone's benefit. But in practice it has few of the good qualities of either UBI or negative taxation. Universal Credit has plenty of nasty cliffs, complicated rules and cruel penalties that push unlucky people deeply into poverty, and it also has an extremely heavy administration cost - every employer must file everyone's individual employment taxes every few weeks online and face heavy fines for getting anything wrong or being a day late.

[nottorp]

That's the other argument for UBI - get rid of the bureaucracy approving benefits.

[imtringued]

The bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term. That is simply how politics works.

[dragonwriter]

> he bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term.

If it is self-defeating, it is not more efficient. And we already have a bureaucracy whose functions include verifying income claims and adjusting net payments based on them in the income tax system, we don’t need a bunch of different bureaucracies doing that redundantly with slightly varied definitions and rules and paperwork that serve little practical purpose besides justifying additional bureaucracies and enforcing self-defeating funding cliffs.

[dbsmith83]

You will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse. I'd argue it'd be larger since the scale is increased

[mercutio2]

With UBI, there is no means testing. So the main “abuse” possible is income tax evasion.

It is possible that there would be fraud around pretending to be a person when that person doesn’t exist, or continuing to collect benefits for someone who is dead.

But “are you a live person” is much harder to fake than “did you make sure you didn’t do these 6 illegible things that would make you ineligible”.

[dbsmith83]

Huge income tax evasion and money laundering. On a massive scale like we don't have today. It would be harder to detect

[nottorp]

If you're doing the negative income tax, yeah. If you do plain UBI, no, because it's an unconditional payment.

[dbsmith83]

We're not talking about hiding money obtained via UBI

[dragonwriter]

> You will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse

When you eliminate means-testing in favor of income taxes and eliminste the myriad different definitions of income and assets for qualification for different programs and the opportunity it creates (and the incentive funding cliffs create) for specialized benefit fraud, there is no special “UBI abuse” to monitor for. You have to monitor for tax fraud, but we’ve got a bureaucracy doing that at society-wide scale anyway.