[Retric]

It’s the opposite. Currently governments subsidize housing, food, internet access, etc for the poor through various programs. There’s no free market interaction when government bureaucrats are deciding where to build affordable housing etc.

UBI toss those programs away saying hand people money and let the free market allocate resources. Hypothetically you hand money to everyone, but as far as the middle class is concerned there is zero difference to lower tax brackets for the first 10,000$/year of income vs 1 tax bracket + a lump sum. So estimates of how expensive UBI would be really come down to how many subsidies you remove.

Further if you believe in free markets then UBI should actually be cheaper for the same social benefit.

[_heimdall]

If you don't like how the government subsidized certain markets today, I'm not quite sure why a good solution would be to subsidize the entire economy.

Such a program is way too complex to model out and reliably predict what the impact will be. We simply don't know how much UBI is the "right" amount for specific outcomes, and we definitely don't know what the impact will be on any subset of the economy.

According to the OP author, we can't even test UBI programs before a full rollout. If we can't reliably model or predict the outcome, and we can test it, how are we supposed to actually implement it?

[Retric]

Subsidizing the economy is a meaningless idea, it reallocates resources.

As to being impossible to model, there’s a great number of countries in the world eventually one will likely try the experiment on its entire economy without impacting 99.9% of the global population.

That said, you can turn individual safety nets into UBI lockstep with changing the tax code and see what happens. The fear is people would spend ‘food’ money on drugs, or people in subsidized housing would move, or all the things which created these programs instead of handing out cash. That’s a political question not an economic one, are we trying to act as a parent or do we want people to have freedom to make their own choices.

[_heimdall]

Literally any economic decision is reallocated resources, that term is much too broad to be meaningful. Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?

Someone will try it, totally agree there. I don't see any problem with that either, countries should be able to do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. I wouldn't tell France they shouldn't try it, but I am absolutely saying I don't want to try it here in the US.

[Retric]

> Are you arguing that a UBI is wealth redistribution specifically?

I’m saying social safety nets are already wealth redistribution. Changing the form of that safety net to UBI is an allocation of resources based on individual decisions and thus free markets where Food Stamps/Housing Subsidies/etc is allocating money based on bureaucratic decisions.

Basically nothing says UBI needs to cost more than existing social safety nets.

[_heimdall]

Social safety nets today are needed weslth distribution. A UBI needs to cover everyone. With the same funding a UBI would have to provide less benefit than the programs we have today.

That said, my argument against a UBI isn't even that it's too expensive. Anyone claiming that a UBI will be too expensive is falling into the same trap those arguing for a UBI fall into. The impact when making such a massive change to our social and economic system is impossible to accurately model and predict. The OP author actually seems to agree with this by pointing out that a UBI program can't be tested. Oddly, though, the author's solution to that is to YOLO a UBI program into our entire country without being able to understand what the likely impacts will be.

[Retric]

UBI requires changes to the tax code, but look at the comparison between SNAP and the 10% tax bracket for people making 0-11,600$ in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086690

At least for single people how SNAP sunsets with income is almost 1:1 with the discount for the lowest tax bracket.

Thus changing SNAP to a low UBI could have almost zero impact.

[HPsquared]

If the current spending on safety nets is spread evenly over the whole society, won't the current recipients not have enough to live?

[Retric]

Only if you ignore the tax code. US example for single people:

SNAP for a single person is $291/month - total income * 0.3 so they get nothing at 11,640 per year of annual income and 291$/month at 0$ annual income.

2024 income brackets for single people are: 10% $0 to $11,600, 12% $11,600 to $47,150, 22% $47,151 to $100,525, ... Maximum tax bracket is 37%.

Hand everyone 260$ per month, but change things so the highest tax bracket 37% applies $0 to $11,600 and everyone making 12,000+$/ year sees zero change in their take home pay. And people making 0$/year get 260$/month.

Those numbers aren’t quite identical, but it’s surprising how close it ends up. At 30%, $0 to $11,640 it’s off by less than 1$/year.