[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

[nottorp]

Then how will UBI encourage income tax evasion? You get it unconditionally so it won’t change anything…

[dbsmith83]

Again, we're not talking about UBI money, we're talking about money earned after UBI. Without UBI, people who work in cash businesses have to report a certain amount of income to justify their living expenses. With UBI, there is nothing to justify, and it makes it much easier to operate your own cash-only side hustles tax-free as long as you live in a place you can afford solely using UBI.