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I get the "point" of UBI, but there is the problem of who pays for it. The answer of "other folks" is very difficult, and to me, the most controversial part of

I get the "point" of UBI, but there is the problem of who pays for it. The answer of "other folks" is very difficult, and to me, the most controversial part of it, which is what I said. To make sure we have the same premise, Universal, by definition, means everyone within a certain boundary (e.g. citizen of a country, city, state, whatever) receives the money, regardless of their income, location, etc? To be functional, the money that is doled out needs to be collected from somewhere. It isn't that each specific person needs to fund themselves, but the set of people that receive the "Universal" basic income needs to generate the income needed to pay for it. If an outside set of people pays for it, then it's not a universal basic income, it's something else -- it's taking money from one set of people to give to another. I believe the whole idea of UBI is that everyone gets that same money. The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people. In what way is that meaningless? I think it's a valid question to ask.

clueless123 10y ago
It is an experiment. If the experiment shows a big enough benefit (increase in productivity, reduced costs on healthcare, improvements on education, etc) then, you start thinking where is that money coming from.
- notahacker 10y ago
  But we don't need to run an experiment to know that giving 6000 people regular income will make them generally better off; that's obvious, especially in the context of a developing country. We need to run an experiment to identify whether redistributing tax money to everybody equally and unconditionally results in better outcomes than various other existing or proposed systems of needs-based handouts, which is a completely different scenario, not least because for a significant proportion of people in the experiment this is going to represent a reduction in their current incomes or other benefits.
AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people. That clearly isn't how a real UBI would work. If you literally take $100/month from everyone and then give it back to them, nothing happens. It would have zero effect. The way UBI works in practice is that everyone gets a fixed amount of money and then everyone pays a fixed percentage in taxes, so that more of the UBI is funded by the wealthier people who pay more taxes. Which is what the experiment is doing. In theory to make it accurate they should also impose a "tax" on the participants based on how much money they make from external sources, i.e. if one of the participants has a job paying $200/month and we want to emulate a 20% tax rate then they get a $100/month UBI but the funders take back $40 (20% of $200) as "tax" to "fund" it. Obviously that wouldn't work if someone had above average income (i.e. they made $1000/month in Kenya and would have a "tax" exceeding the UBI) because nobody would volunteer for a study that cost them money. But you could at least see what a UBI would do for poorer populations, which would seem to be the interesting question, because for richer people it just looks a lot like any other "take from the rich and give to the poor" welfare program.
- JonFish85 10y ago
  Right, I'm not saying that everyone pays themselves $100/mo; clearly that's not going to do a thing. I'm saying that I think the same set of people who receive the money should be taxed to pay for it. The thing of UBI is that it will be paid by your average person who isn't wealthy, it will be paid by the upper middle class. Your example of people volunteering for a study that costs them money is exactly the problem that I am describing, and for a system such as this to work, that's how it would end up--taxes go up for people who this doesn't benefit, and as much fun as it is to assume that "other rich people" will pay for it, it doesn't work that way. That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > The thing of UBI is that it will be paid by your average person who isn't wealthy, it will be paid by the upper middle class. That's generally how all taxes work. The people with more money than average pay more than average and the people with less money than average pay less than average. But the people who make $1 more than average are only suffering a net loss of $.20, whereas the people who make $100,000 more than average are paying net $20,000. > That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100. In other words what you think we should do is to actually make it a law somewhere?
deleted 10y ago
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clueless123 10y ago

It is an experiment. If the experiment shows a big enough benefit (increase in productivity, reduced costs on healthcare, improvements on education, etc) then, you start thinking where is that money coming from.

notahacker 10y ago
But we don't need to run an experiment to know that giving 6000 people regular income will make them generally better off; that's obvious, especially in the context of a developing country. We need to run an experiment to identify whether redistributing tax money to everybody equally and unconditionally results in better outcomes than various other existing or proposed systems of needs-based handouts, which is a completely different scenario, not least because for a significant proportion of people in the experiment this is going to represent a reduction in their current incomes or other benefits.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> The real problem is the collection problem: if you have a set of these 3,000 people who receive, say, $100/mo (made-up number), then I think a true test of Universal Basic Income is that the income has to come from that same set of 3,000 people. That clearly isn't how a real UBI would work. If you literally take $100/month from everyone and then give it back to them, nothing happens. It would have zero effect. The way UBI works in practice is that everyone gets a fixed amount of money and then everyone pays a fixed percentage in taxes, so that more of the UBI is funded by the wealthier people who pay more taxes. Which is what the experiment is doing. In theory to make it accurate they should also impose a "tax" on the participants based on how much money they make from external sources, i.e. if one of the participants has a job paying $200/month and we want to emulate a 20% tax rate then they get a $100/month UBI but the funders take back $40 (20% of $200) as "tax" to "fund" it. Obviously that wouldn't work if someone had above average income (i.e. they made $1000/month in Kenya and would have a "tax" exceeding the UBI) because nobody would volunteer for a study that cost them money. But you could at least see what a UBI would do for poorer populations, which would seem to be the interesting question, because for richer people it just looks a lot like any other "take from the rich and give to the poor" welfare program.

JonFish85 10y ago
Right, I'm not saying that everyone pays themselves $100/mo; clearly that's not going to do a thing. I'm saying that I think the same set of people who receive the money should be taxed to pay for it. The thing of UBI is that it will be paid by your average person who isn't wealthy, it will be paid by the upper middle class. Your example of people volunteering for a study that costs them money is exactly the problem that I am describing, and for a system such as this to work, that's how it would end up--taxes go up for people who this doesn't benefit, and as much fun as it is to assume that "other rich people" will pay for it, it doesn't work that way. That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > The thing of UBI is that it will be paid by your average person who isn't wealthy, it will be paid by the upper middle class. That's generally how all taxes work. The people with more money than average pay more than average and the people with less money than average pay less than average. But the people who make $1 more than average are only suffering a net loss of $.20, whereas the people who make $100,000 more than average are paying net $20,000. > That's why I think a better test is to select a group of people to self-fund their own UBI -- some people pay $140 and receive $100. Others pay $20 and receive $100. In other words what you think we should do is to actually make it a law somewhere?

deleted 10y ago

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