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The largest concerns about basic income are that it will reduce the incentive to work for at least some people, and that it is phenomenally expensive. Why not

The largest concerns about basic income are that it will reduce the incentive to work for at least some people, and that it is phenomenally expensive. Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most. I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living. They use arguments like helping the poor, or putting everyone on an even playing field, or the claim that tech will eventually destroy jobs anyway as Trojan horses for this agenda. I don't agree and I think most people would disapprove of basic income if you told them that it was intended to undermine the culture of working and earning to make your own living. If you really want to help the poor and the working class, support the elimination of income tax on the lower income brackets instead of basic income. It is a simpler, better, cheaper, and less divisive solution.

Gustomaximus 10y ago
Have you seen the concept of a negative tax rate? It's similar but geared to provide money to those that have lower earnings. Interesting concept like UBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Only problem with that is that it doesn't get rid of the bureaucracy which is one of the very reasons UBI has been proposed. On another note I don't understand why the word Universal is being used. The point is that it's unconditional compared to the conditional version of something like Negative Income Tax.
jclulow 10y ago
You can't give people a tax break if they earn literally nothing. There isn't necessarily an economically sensible job for every single person, and it seems ridiculous to invent bullshit or demeaning jobs just so that people can work to eat. I reject the idea that working any deadend awful job just to get by is somehow virtuous. I love what I do, and I would do it even if I didn't need to work -- but being able to say that is an extremely privileged position to be in. We're automating away industry after industry. There already aren't enough jobs to go around, and that will only get worse from here on out. I have no idea what the future should look like, but we have to start by accepting that the value of working at a job to feed yourself is not irreducible or axiomatic.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  There isn't necessarily an economically sensible job for every single person,... Sure there is. Domestic labor (maid, cook, driver, servant) for more productive people. Mechanical turk. Selling loose cigarettes. Making tacos for people and selling them by the side of the road. We know that these are jobs people could possibly do because in India people actually do them. Americans just have the opportunity not to work, so they take that opportunity. This makes us all poorer. BI only makes the problem worse.
  - jclulow 10y ago
    It's not really clear how having people "selling loose cigarettes" helps us all become richer. But that _is_ a perfect example of an invented, demeaning occupation that nobody needs to be doing. Just because somebody in another country might be trying to scrape together a living that way, because there are no better options, doesn't make it _good_. We're building better labour saving devices all the time, but that has a human cost. When the long haul trucking industry is inevitably automated, it's frankly callous and unfeeling to suggest that we'll all be richer by forcing those former drivers to become the domestic servants of "more productive people".
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Selling loose cigarettes provides convenience for folks who smoke rarely and don't want to carry a full pack. So does making tacos, cleaning houses, etc. We all become richer because we have more tacos, cleaner houses, etc. Wealth is goods and services. You seem to disagree with me about shared obligations; you think that some folks deserve to be able to live off the productive output of others and provide nothing in return. I think all people should contribute to society as best they are able - "from each according to his abilities" was an important part of Marxism. That's fine - just recognize that "I don't want people to work" is a very different claim from "there already aren't enough jobs to go around".
      - thatcat 10y ago
jacalata 10y ago
Australia raised the income tax threshold to AU$18,000 IN 2012 - https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior-years/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior... It solves a completely different problem to a basic income. If I break both legs and can't work as a laborer any more, it does nothing for me. If I have a baby and daycare costs more than my available jobs, it does nothing for me. If I'm 56 and get laid off, or 19 and want to get a degree, it does nothing for me.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  FWIW, in Finland the income tax threshold is € 12700 (i.e. you don't pay income tax for earned income lower than that) which is almost exactly the same as in Australia. The taxation is quite progressive, so low earners pay less tax than in most European countries, and high earners pay more than almost anywhere else in OECD (depending a little on family status etc). The main problem for Finland's tax collection is too few high earners to get enough tax revenue (not entirely unsurprisingly, because the other policy goal is a flat income distribution.) I don't think the basic income experiment changes anything, though. It's impossible to move to BI because some people would lose money so any change would be extremely unpopular. And a change where "everybody wins" would be prohibitively expensive.
michaelchisari 10y ago
Basic Income isn't meant to supplant making a living. It's meant to provide survival.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
Like many, you've misunderstood basic income. The point of basic income is that it is universal. It is fundamentally a social welfare program, but it is designed to be a more effective one. By far one of the biggest problems of being poor and especially unemployed is lack of cash flow. This doesn't just get in the way of living a "luxurious" lifestyle, but it causes fundamental problems which can drastically reduce quality of life and often increases the cost of living. This is a well known problem, people with very little money end up forced buying things of low quality, and they end up getting less value for their money, they also find themselves in emergencies because they are unable to pay for essentials. Moreover, there are huge problems related to improperly aligned incentives when it comes to traditional social welfare programs. With UBI the incentives are, however, very properly aligned. If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so. UBI merely sets a floor on the minimum level of quality of life that is possible. It does not destroy an incentive to work it merely destroys the coercion to work any job whatsoever in order to avoid starvation. Personally I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Additionally, your point about elimination of the income tax on lower income brackets is tone deaf. This already exists today. The bottom 40% of incomes in the US pay essentially no federal income tax, with many people in those income ranges receiving money back from the federal government in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
- neilwilson 10y ago
  "If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so." That's a fallacy of composition. Not everybody can, because there aren't enough jobs to go around. So about 5% are always permanently in poverty. Fundamentally you need to change the labour market from a buyers to a sellers market. Until you do that, nothing changes.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    I think the point is that it will always be beneficial to work. Whether people choose to do so and can find something right there is another discussion but with a base income thats livable you have a base and every thing you do whether that is only one more job is going to make you a little richer instead of the current system where it's all based on conditional thinking. To give an example. In Denmark the book that determines the laws when it comes to unemployment benefits is 26.000 pages. That's a lot of bureaucracy which can be killed right there.
neilwilson 10y ago
The largest concern is that it ends up being a form of theft from workers in real terms. The income receiving individual gets paid twice in real terms - consumption of goods and services provided by others and consumption of their own labour hours. Those producing the goods and services end up with more money, but less in the pool to buy with it. More money chasing less output is inflation. We need a system that allows the exchange of labour hours for goods and services, not compulsory handouts.
ThomPete 10y ago
It will always be beneficial to work on UBI, that's the whole point. The only reason why someone wouldn't be incentivized is if the actual amount is extremely high. But the very fact that it's unconditional is the whole difference here as that makes it always valuable to do more work even just one hour more. Giving tax breaks to people who make no money isn't helping the poor.
lmm 10y ago
> Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most. My country already does that (no income tax below something like $14,000). That doesn't replace basic income - you still need to do something about people who aren't in work, so there are still a variety of benefits (disability, housing, unemployment), and that variety of benefits is still cut if you start working, so there is still the problem that someone working 5 hours a week is worse off than someone working 0.
jernfrost 10y ago
"Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious" That doesn't work. It is already essentially done in the US and hasn't solved the significant poverty problems in the US. Quite the contrary it has likely made the situation worse. Studies show that when the poor don't pay taxes they end up being vilified by the middle class and viewed as leeches. "Why do we pay for free stuff for them", would be the rebuttal. This excepting the poor of taxes erodes the support for welfare programs, and tax cuts on a low salary can't make up for cuts to programs such as public education, subsidized health care etc. Studies show the best way to reduce poverty is through broad non-means tested programs everybody gets whether they are rich or poor, because that allows the whole population to keep its support behind these programs as everybody benefits from them. It also allows resourceful people to demand quality and improvements. Examples of this is e.g. public education. Whenever education is segregated into public education for the poor and private for the well off, then public education is almost always shitty quality. When the middle class and rich also send their kids to public school, it tends to be of high quality as the powerful will pressure government to keep quality high. There are some great examples of this from when black and white schools got desegregated. As soon as white kids got sent to black schools, those schools saw dramatic quality improvement as there became much stronger political pressure from resourceful people to improve those schools. "I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living" I suspect that is what people against basic income usually suspect about advocates. You engage in a rather human logical fallacy. Assuming people supporting something primarily do it for their own benefit. I support legalized prostitution and drugs. Yet I am not a prostitute, john or drug addict. Wow how can I hold that position then? Hint I care about practical solutions to real problems in society. I don't really believe in universal basic income but not for the reasons you state. I don't think the problem is that people wouldn't work, but rather that it could never be high enough to replace all the things a welfare system now takes care of.

Gustomaximus 10y ago

Have you seen the concept of a negative tax rate? It's similar but geared to provide money to those that have lower earnings. Interesting concept like UBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

ThomPete 10y ago
Only problem with that is that it doesn't get rid of the bureaucracy which is one of the very reasons UBI has been proposed. On another note I don't understand why the word Universal is being used. The point is that it's unconditional compared to the conditional version of something like Negative Income Tax.

jclulow 10y ago

You can't give people a tax break if they earn literally nothing. There isn't necessarily an economically sensible job for every single person, and it seems ridiculous to invent bullshit or demeaning jobs just so that people can work to eat. I reject the idea that working any deadend awful job just to get by is somehow virtuous. I love what I do, and I would do it even if I didn't need to work -- but being able to say that is an extremely privileged position to be in. We're automating away industry after industry. There already aren't enough jobs to go around, and that will only get worse from here on out. I have no idea what the future should look like, but we have to start by accepting that the value of working at a job to feed yourself is not irreducible or axiomatic.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
There isn't necessarily an economically sensible job for every single person,... Sure there is. Domestic labor (maid, cook, driver, servant) for more productive people. Mechanical turk. Selling loose cigarettes. Making tacos for people and selling them by the side of the road. We know that these are jobs people could possibly do because in India people actually do them. Americans just have the opportunity not to work, so they take that opportunity. This makes us all poorer. BI only makes the problem worse.
- jclulow 10y ago
  It's not really clear how having people "selling loose cigarettes" helps us all become richer. But that _is_ a perfect example of an invented, demeaning occupation that nobody needs to be doing. Just because somebody in another country might be trying to scrape together a living that way, because there are no better options, doesn't make it _good_. We're building better labour saving devices all the time, but that has a human cost. When the long haul trucking industry is inevitably automated, it's frankly callous and unfeeling to suggest that we'll all be richer by forcing those former drivers to become the domestic servants of "more productive people".
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Selling loose cigarettes provides convenience for folks who smoke rarely and don't want to carry a full pack. So does making tacos, cleaning houses, etc. We all become richer because we have more tacos, cleaner houses, etc. Wealth is goods and services. You seem to disagree with me about shared obligations; you think that some folks deserve to be able to live off the productive output of others and provide nothing in return. I think all people should contribute to society as best they are able - "from each according to his abilities" was an important part of Marxism. That's fine - just recognize that "I don't want people to work" is a very different claim from "there already aren't enough jobs to go around".
    - thatcat 10y ago

jacalata 10y ago

Australia raised the income tax threshold to AU$18,000 IN 2012 - https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior-years/ https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior... It solves a completely different problem to a basic income. If I break both legs and can't work as a laborer any more, it does nothing for me. If I have a baby and daycare costs more than my available jobs, it does nothing for me. If I'm 56 and get laid off, or 19 and want to get a degree, it does nothing for me.

ptaipale 10y ago
FWIW, in Finland the income tax threshold is € 12700 (i.e. you don't pay income tax for earned income lower than that) which is almost exactly the same as in Australia. The taxation is quite progressive, so low earners pay less tax than in most European countries, and high earners pay more than almost anywhere else in OECD (depending a little on family status etc). The main problem for Finland's tax collection is too few high earners to get enough tax revenue (not entirely unsurprisingly, because the other policy goal is a flat income distribution.) I don't think the basic income experiment changes anything, though. It's impossible to move to BI because some people would lose money so any change would be extremely unpopular. And a change where "everybody wins" would be prohibitively expensive.

michaelchisari 10y ago

Basic Income isn't meant to supplant making a living. It's meant to provide survival.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

Like many, you've misunderstood basic income. The point of basic income is that it is universal. It is fundamentally a social welfare program, but it is designed to be a more effective one. By far one of the biggest problems of being poor and especially unemployed is lack of cash flow. This doesn't just get in the way of living a "luxurious" lifestyle, but it causes fundamental problems which can drastically reduce quality of life and often increases the cost of living. This is a well known problem, people with very little money end up forced buying things of low quality, and they end up getting less value for their money, they also find themselves in emergencies because they are unable to pay for essentials. Moreover, there are huge problems related to improperly aligned incentives when it comes to traditional social welfare programs. With UBI the incentives are, however, very properly aligned. If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so. UBI merely sets a floor on the minimum level of quality of life that is possible. It does not destroy an incentive to work it merely destroys the coercion to work any job whatsoever in order to avoid starvation. Personally I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Additionally, your point about elimination of the income tax on lower income brackets is tone deaf. This already exists today. The bottom 40% of incomes in the US pay essentially no federal income tax, with many people in those income ranges receiving money back from the federal government in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

neilwilson 10y ago
"If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so." That's a fallacy of composition. Not everybody can, because there aren't enough jobs to go around. So about 5% are always permanently in poverty. Fundamentally you need to change the labour market from a buyers to a sellers market. Until you do that, nothing changes.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  I think the point is that it will always be beneficial to work. Whether people choose to do so and can find something right there is another discussion but with a base income thats livable you have a base and every thing you do whether that is only one more job is going to make you a little richer instead of the current system where it's all based on conditional thinking. To give an example. In Denmark the book that determines the laws when it comes to unemployment benefits is 26.000 pages. That's a lot of bureaucracy which can be killed right there.

neilwilson 10y ago

The largest concern is that it ends up being a form of theft from workers in real terms. The income receiving individual gets paid twice in real terms - consumption of goods and services provided by others and consumption of their own labour hours. Those producing the goods and services end up with more money, but less in the pool to buy with it. More money chasing less output is inflation. We need a system that allows the exchange of labour hours for goods and services, not compulsory handouts.

ThomPete 10y ago

It will always be beneficial to work on UBI, that's the whole point. The only reason why someone wouldn't be incentivized is if the actual amount is extremely high. But the very fact that it's unconditional is the whole difference here as that makes it always valuable to do more work even just one hour more. Giving tax breaks to people who make no money isn't helping the poor.

lmm 10y ago

> Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most. My country already does that (no income tax below something like $14,000). That doesn't replace basic income - you still need to do something about people who aren't in work, so there are still a variety of benefits (disability, housing, unemployment), and that variety of benefits is still cut if you start working, so there is still the problem that someone working 5 hours a week is worse off than someone working 0.

jernfrost 10y ago

"Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious" That doesn't work. It is already essentially done in the US and hasn't solved the significant poverty problems in the US. Quite the contrary it has likely made the situation worse. Studies show that when the poor don't pay taxes they end up being vilified by the middle class and viewed as leeches. "Why do we pay for free stuff for them", would be the rebuttal. This excepting the poor of taxes erodes the support for welfare programs, and tax cuts on a low salary can't make up for cuts to programs such as public education, subsidized health care etc. Studies show the best way to reduce poverty is through broad non-means tested programs everybody gets whether they are rich or poor, because that allows the whole population to keep its support behind these programs as everybody benefits from them. It also allows resourceful people to demand quality and improvements. Examples of this is e.g. public education. Whenever education is segregated into public education for the poor and private for the well off, then public education is almost always shitty quality. When the middle class and rich also send their kids to public school, it tends to be of high quality as the powerful will pressure government to keep quality high. There are some great examples of this from when black and white schools got desegregated. As soon as white kids got sent to black schools, those schools saw dramatic quality improvement as there became much stronger political pressure from resourceful people to improve those schools. "I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living" I suspect that is what people against basic income usually suspect about advocates. You engage in a rather human logical fallacy. Assuming people supporting something primarily do it for their own benefit. I support legalized prostitution and drugs. Yet I am not a prostitute, john or drug addict. Wow how can I hold that position then? Hint I care about practical solutions to real problems in society. I don't really believe in universal basic income but not for the reasons you state. I don't think the problem is that people wouldn't work, but rather that it could never be high enough to replace all the things a welfare system now takes care of.