[disgruntledphd2]

> My reading of this is that the threshhold for the USA government to withdraw financial (and other?) support for disabled people is too low, is that right?

In general, step functions (earn 200 get benefits, 201 no benefits) are really really bad from a public policy perspective. If you want to get people out of these dependency traps then you need to taper them more effectively.

Even tapering them is problematic as you end up with astronomically high effective marginal tax rates, but it's better than a hard cut off.

[butlike]

But at a certain level, you'll need a step function to go from 0 (none; no taper) to 1 (taper).

[zbentley]

I'm not sure that's true, though most policies are implemented that way. If you get, say, a basic income payout that's a function of the income you make, that function scales all the way from 0 income/max UBI to >= max UBI income/0 UBI.

Not that that's like ... a policy slam-dunk or anything. Even putting aside the massive hurdle of getting UBI enacted into law, you'd still have to cope with sources of unreported income, asset/gift valuation, and so on. But that second category are, at least, tractable problems as evidenced by most countries' tax codes having contingencies to deal with them.

[inigyou]

The U in UBI is that you give the same amount to everyone to avoid all that bullshit work of deciding who should get it. Then you raise income tax percentages so that people with a certain income are paying zero net and people with more income are paying into the system.

[ElevenLathe]

This is true only in the trivial sense that one can't process a payment for less than a penny.