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Saving on bureaucracy is a frequently made argument that I have never seen supported by a quantitative analysis. Do they exist? Such a claim seems untrue on its

Saving on bureaucracy is a frequently made argument that I have never seen supported by a quantitative analysis. Do they exist? Such a claim seems untrue on its face. You can't eliminate the welfare bureaucracy with UBI because: - You won't want to be giving free money to literally everyone, only people within your jurisdiction. So you still need to figure out who those people are and whether they're authorised to receive UBI. - It will act as even more of a magnet for illegal immigration, so you'd still need to spend on border reinforcements. Same problem as they have now in Germany and Sweden: lots of people turned up who can't work and sit on welfare forever. If you don't stop this it's in reality a policy of giving out enough free money to live by western standards to the entire world, which isn't how it's being advertised. - You still need to deduplicate everyone and ensure people can't register for UBI over and over. - You need to stop people creating fake identities to receive UBI for people who don't exist. - You still need to ensure UBI stops being paid when someone dies, even though families and friends have strong incentives to stop the state finding out about a death. - You still need to decide how much the UBI is, how much it should change, and whether the amount should vary by location. What's plenty for someone in the countryside may be considered insufficient in the city. - You still need to track where people live, the moment you give way on the amount being adjusted regionally, which you will because the sort of people who most enthusiastically support UBI are all-in on the type of "fairness" that invariably means not treating people the same. Or are they going to advocate for a single income tax rate across all earning bands as well? - You will need a huge rise in taxes to pay for this, meaning tax evasion and avoidance will also go up quite dramatically. You'll need to bulk up the tax bureaucracies to handle this. UBI is just a modern rebranding of what in the 20th century was called the socialist utopia. People tried it, it doesn't work. That was Russia at the start of the 1900s. UBI advocates today seem to have forgotten about all that, but they're re-treading intellectually dead ground.

mcv 6y ago
> "So you still need to figure out who those people are and whether they're authorised to receive UBI." You need to figure out who they are to be able to give them money in the first place. That's not the thing you're saving on, but all the other checks to see if you're justifiably unemployed/disabled enough to be receiving this money. A big problem with the welfare system is that people only get it when they don't work. They lose it when they get a job, which can often mean they actually lose purchasing power, so they're effectively being punished for working. UBI creates a system where you always get ahead by working, even if it's only a little bit. Of course you still need the basic civil bureaucracy; every country needs that. But you don't need an extra layer of bureaucracy on top of that.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Yet people routinely choose to get off welfare and get a job, so clearly, the thresholding can't be that bad. Obviously there's going to be some cases where some jobs and welfare package combinations don't make financial sense in the instant, if you assume no chance that the job will ever lead to a pay rise. But it works well enough most of the time. I've argued above that in fact you will still need a complex welfare bureaucracy that looks very similar to the one we have today, given even basic constraints like "there should not be excessive levels of fraud". Deciding if people have a job or not is a trivial cost compared to the entry-level costs of just making sure you're paying people who exist and you only pay them once. Again - does anyone have a rigorous, convincing analysis of the cost of means testing specifically? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Especially because people who argue for UBI do not argue for the abolition of things like disability benefits, government subsidised health insurance and various other means-tested subsidies.
  - mcv 6y ago
    Some people do, some people don't. The threshold is surmountable for some people, but it could be a lot lower. > "you will still need a complex welfare bureaucracy that looks very similar to the one we have today, given even basic constraints like "there should not be excessive levels of fraud". Deciding if people have a job or not is a trivial cost compared to the entry-level costs of just making sure you're paying people who exist and you only pay them once." I strongly disagree. For one, there's a lot less room for fraud if it's something that everybody gets. Secondly, the government already needs to know that people exist. People get born, they go to school, they pay taxes, they vote, they die. > "Especially because people who argue for UBI do not argue for the abolition of things like disability benefits, government subsidised health insurance and various other means-tested subsidies." I would prefer those not to be means-tested, but equal for everybody. If you're disabled, you get disability benefits on top of your basic income, and you get to keep them even if you do manage to get a job despite your disability. Similarly, I'd like to see health insurance as part of that basic income. The only place to test people's income would be for paying taxes. Basic income takes care of everything else. (I suspect even progressive taxation might be replaced with a single flat tax rate in the basic income is high enough.)

mcv 6y ago

> "So you still need to figure out who those people are and whether they're authorised to receive UBI." You need to figure out who they are to be able to give them money in the first place. That's not the thing you're saving on, but all the other checks to see if you're justifiably unemployed/disabled enough to be receiving this money. A big problem with the welfare system is that people only get it when they don't work. They lose it when they get a job, which can often mean they actually lose purchasing power, so they're effectively being punished for working. UBI creates a system where you always get ahead by working, even if it's only a little bit. Of course you still need the basic civil bureaucracy; every country needs that. But you don't need an extra layer of bureaucracy on top of that.

thu2111 6y ago
Yet people routinely choose to get off welfare and get a job, so clearly, the thresholding can't be that bad. Obviously there's going to be some cases where some jobs and welfare package combinations don't make financial sense in the instant, if you assume no chance that the job will ever lead to a pay rise. But it works well enough most of the time. I've argued above that in fact you will still need a complex welfare bureaucracy that looks very similar to the one we have today, given even basic constraints like "there should not be excessive levels of fraud". Deciding if people have a job or not is a trivial cost compared to the entry-level costs of just making sure you're paying people who exist and you only pay them once. Again - does anyone have a rigorous, convincing analysis of the cost of means testing specifically? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Especially because people who argue for UBI do not argue for the abolition of things like disability benefits, government subsidised health insurance and various other means-tested subsidies.
- mcv 6y ago
  Some people do, some people don't. The threshold is surmountable for some people, but it could be a lot lower. > "you will still need a complex welfare bureaucracy that looks very similar to the one we have today, given even basic constraints like "there should not be excessive levels of fraud". Deciding if people have a job or not is a trivial cost compared to the entry-level costs of just making sure you're paying people who exist and you only pay them once." I strongly disagree. For one, there's a lot less room for fraud if it's something that everybody gets. Secondly, the government already needs to know that people exist. People get born, they go to school, they pay taxes, they vote, they die. > "Especially because people who argue for UBI do not argue for the abolition of things like disability benefits, government subsidised health insurance and various other means-tested subsidies." I would prefer those not to be means-tested, but equal for everybody. If you're disabled, you get disability benefits on top of your basic income, and you get to keep them even if you do manage to get a job despite your disability. Similarly, I'd like to see health insurance as part of that basic income. The only place to test people's income would be for paying taxes. Basic income takes care of everything else. (I suspect even progressive taxation might be replaced with a single flat tax rate in the basic income is high enough.)