At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients.
No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if you make $1 more before the benefit you still get less than $1 after. Maybe even a lot less, like only $.30. But you should never lose money.
This is obvious. It goes to show how bad beaurocracy and subtle misaligned incentives are that these hard cutoffs ever existed in the first place.
Right, and this is one of the reasons why I support a UBI that replaces most existing welfare programs. Amazingly some people criticize UBI on the grounds that it removes the incentive to work, when it's almost exactly the opposite.
Funnily, I'm okay with people not working if they didn't want to. Most people would end up getting bored doing nothing after a few months and work with what they like to do anyway.
Devil's advocate: the longer you stay away from gainful employment, the more marketable skills you lose. (This is one of the arguments against a minimum wage; that it keeps low-skill and therefore low-pay labor from establishing a foothold in the labor marketplace that would enable them to up-skill over time.) So UBI would incentivize the creation of a permanently unemployable underclass.
I'm OK with people not working if they don't want to, too, as long as those people are OK with subsistence-level living standards. I don't see why able-bodied people who are capable of working but just don't want to should live a comfortable life at the expense of the working taxpayer.
Point taken, Mr. Devil. I even agree, up to a point - and I think this might be a major issue in the immediate introduction of a UBI. The reason why is that the incentives will change but there will be many who have learned the system under different conditions and will not so easily adjust.
I've grown up amongst poverty and while I don't particularly like the term (as it tends to be deployed in aid of demagoguery), there really is a element of 'welfare culture' in effect, and having been on welfare myself (and treated like a prince because bizarrely the system was obviously classist: so Ed you're an out of work indie game dev and you're currently learning something called 'Nim'? "well that's just great then have some money". Go in there as a bricklayer and say you are looking but haven't found any work the past few weeks: here are 20 forms). I was always very impressed on the knowledge these working class labourers would have of the welfare system, because in their situation it really made a difference.
Their attidue was: (and who can blame them) fuck the govt they don't give a shit about me, the more I get / the more I can play the system, the better.
UBI from their perspective would be total victory. No more queuing no more forms or interviews, just free money for ever. But what then?
If the UBI was only sufficient for survival / dignity but not enough for luxury I think the psychological topology chances a lot and what could be previously described as 'getting one over on this enemy' now can only be described as your own failure.
> as long as those people are OK with subsistence-level living standards.
I mean, UBI never meant "Extravagant money." It has always meant something akin to "basic standards for survival."
The entire idea from what I understand is that you should be able to survive just fine, not have it pay for your 98" micro OLED :P
> the longer you stay away from gainful employment, the more marketable skills you lose.
I sorta relate to this as someone who's been coasting by at my current job for last year or so. But I'm also working to upskill myself actively. You bring a good point but I don't know what teh solution to that would be.
The devil doesn't need volunteer advocates, he can afford plenty paid. But you actually make the case for UBI as a replacement for means-tested welfare and its associated cliffs: “the longer you stay away from gainful employment, the more marketable skills you lose.”
That's one of the main points of UBI as a replacement for means-tested welfare [0]: eliminating the perverse incentives against maximizing outside work and for expending energy into working the system that exists with means-tested welfare that has complex eligibility rules and is rapidly cut with outside income. By making the clawback much slower and starting much higher up the income scale through the tax system, UBI, compared to the status quo, rewards gaining additional income in the labor (or other) market and learning skills other than navigating a welfare system.
There is a reason that UBI—under the name “negative income tax” because of the political valence of taxation on that corner of the political universe—was originally a right-libertarian proposal.
> I'm OK with people not working if they don't want to, too, as long as those people are OK with subsistence-level living standards
There's no plausible way a UBI provides anything substantially better than that any time in the near (likely, the lifespan of abyone now living) future, so that shouldn't be a problem.
[0] Perhaps even stronger if UBI is also seen as a (partial or full) replacement for the minimum wage, which could be justified because, unlike means-trsted welfare, it doesn't tail off with income and provides a basic support level for all—there is then no reason that employment must also serve that minimal support purpose, which makes it possible to offer employment whose marginal value to the employer is less than would minimally support an employee, but which would still be positive (and in some cases still have more long-term value to the employee because of experience that could contribute to more valuable future employment.)
I'm early-retired and all I can say is that it didn't work that way for me. I do have more time, but I'm not so bored that I want to tie up my schedule. I'll come up with a project I can do at my own pace.
It's sort of like telling yourself that you'll go back to school. Some people do, but most don't.
> I'll come up with a project I can do at my own pace.
Right, but wouldn't that be similar? Obviously there are going to be people who are going to say "screw it, I'm going to live like this" on a basic survival-wage UBI, but I doubt a majority would want to.
I wouldn't expect a small but steady income to be enough all by itself, but it will put people closer to retiring. When combined with some savings, I'd expect some people would choose to retire earlier than they would if they didn't have it.
I do support UBI, but I also expect that it would have complicated effects.
The most common variant is for (effectively) every adult citizen to receive a fixed "tax refund" amount.
This is paid for by a combination of: replacing existing welfare with UBI, retrenching the bureaucrats that used to implement those complex welfare programs, and increasing the percentage of income tax paid.
There's some threshold where you might pay extra $20K on your income, but you get a flat $20K back as UBI, so you don't notice any change. This is typically somewhere in the middle class. Everyone poorer than this gets a boost to their income and/or have their existing welfare (and associated requirements!) replaced by an unconditional payment.
Everyone richer pays more tax, but not a huge amount more, since UBI mostly replaces existing welfare. It isn't an entirely new type of welfare on top of existing welfare -- this is the strawman that the right-wing likes to use in debates.
> At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients.
Multiple programs, offered by different jurisdictions, with overlapping populations, each with sliding scale benefits that reduce less than $1 of benefit for each $ of income, still can (and do) end up with beneficiaries losing in net with additional income. But instead of doing so at particular cliff points associated with each program, they do so continually over a wide range. You replace a series of cliffs with a slide.
What is the point of saying something like this? Would you prefer that people just not bother to do anything and let poor people starve to death instead?
Republicans want to cut funding to programs, then point at how bad the underfunded program is doing, thus demanding more cuts. Either the result is the department is killed, or is on a shoestring budget and everyone hates them. Many were welcomed departments doing good works. People eventually tire of chronically underfunded gov depts, and vote the other side.
Democrats want more taxes, which inevitable come from middle class, not being able to get it from the poor or rich. Then they set laws in those programs as "means testing", where the poor get the benefits, and the middle class doesn't. The rich never needed it. The middle class tire of paying for everything and getting nothing, and vote the other side.
And, that pendulum swings back and forth.
And that's how we get this horrible ass-backward system we have. And going back to first principles and doing is right is "against the other side!".
If we anticipate the private or nonprofit providers might perform poverty alleviation more optimally, we
(1) massively duplicate fixed costs for logistics
(2) ignore that a primary reason governments exist at all is to help prevent people from starving to death, despite it often being hijacked by powermongers
Just gotta say, that's a pretty extreme position to take.
No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if you make $1 more before the benefit you still get less than $1 after. Maybe even a lot less, like only $.30. But you should never lose money.
This is obvious. It goes to show how bad beaurocracy and subtle misaligned incentives are that these hard cutoffs ever existed in the first place.