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The niece couldn't take the better paying job due to a "cliff" - the abrupt loss of food stamps due to a tiny increase in income. If it was gradual withdrawal
by jlokier 5y ago
The niece couldn't take the better paying job due to a "cliff" - the abrupt loss of food stamps due to a tiny increase in income.
If it was gradual withdrawal rather than a cliff, she could afford to take the job.
The UK's Universal Credit is supposed to be gradual and therefore work out to everyone's benefit. But in practice it has few of the good qualities of either UBI or negative taxation. Universal Credit has plenty of nasty cliffs, complicated rules and cruel penalties that push unlucky people deeply into poverty, and it also has an extremely heavy administration cost - every employer must file everyone's individual employment taxes every few weeks online and face heavy fines for getting anything wrong or being a day late.
- nottorp 5y agoThat's the other argument for UBI - get rid of the bureaucracy approving benefits.
- imtringued 5y agoThe bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term. That is simply how politics works.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> he bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term. If it is self-defeating, it is not more efficient. And we already have a bureaucracy whose functions include verifying income claims and adjusting net payments based on them in the income tax system, we don’t need a bunch of different bureaucracies doing that redundantly with slightly varied definitions and rules and paperwork that serve little practical purpose besides justifying additional bureaucracies and enforcing self-defeating funding cliffs.
- dbsmith83 5y agoYou will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse. I'd argue it'd be larger since the scale is increased
- mercutio2 5y agoWith UBI, there is no means testing. So the main “abuse” possible is income tax evasion. It is possible that there would be fraud around pretending to be a person when that person doesn’t exist, or continuing to collect benefits for someone who is dead. But “are you a live person” is much harder to fake than “did you make sure you didn’t do these 6 illegible things that would make you ineligible”.