[StackRanker3000]

> The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop.

UBI is typically not envisioned as means-tested (hence ”universal”).

[qqqwerty]

But in practice, the funds are going to have to come from somewhere. Most likely from taxes. So assuming it comes from income taxes, and assuming those income taxes are progressive, at some point along the income scale your UBI is cancelled out by an increase in taxes. It would be a bit silly to give someone $12k/yr in UBI if they are making $500k/yr in income and we would need to increase their taxes by $24k/yr to pay for the program. Just tax them $12k/yr.

This is why I like NIT. It is much more transparent about how the benefit scales with income. At this point if anyone mentions UBI, I just mentally substitute that with NIT as it is a much more practical and easy to understand implementation.