Good overview. I think one thing that gets left out is how do you handle systemic sustainability: ie "if everyone quit their jobs and went on BI, there would be no one working to pay taxes to pay for the BI expenses".<p>This could just be solved by having a total BI payout pegged at a fixed % of overall tax revenues. As more people earn less and pay less taxes, BI payouts also decrease as they are split among more people so the burden on the remaining taxpayers doesn't overwhelm them.<p>Then we could adjust that % every year (or not) based on actual conditions, how generous / prosperous / stingy we as a society are feeling, plus it gives a mechanism by which automation productivity gains can get rolled back into a BI program to (warning: utopian thinking ahead) eventually fund fewer workers overall, plus workers who work fewer hours, but we still have economic/automation gains rolled (via ongoing taxation) back into the BI support.<p>This basically shores up the "moral hazard" counterargument to BI proposals (which is the first thing that comes up for me after the "how do you pay for it" thing Max solved).
My goal with this piece is to deconstruct basic income into parallelizable, redistribution-neutral pieces:
1) Replacing non-cash benefits with cash
2) Smoothing the payout curve to avoid welfare traps
3) Replacing means-tested negative income tax with universal basic income<p>I hope this makes the idea more palatable to conservatives, as opposed to proposing a particular level of basic income (e.g. $15k/year) and then figuring out how to finance the extra cost. If we want society to redistribute more, that's fine, but IMO should be addressed separately from basic income, which can be beneficially enacted within the current redistribution parameters. The framework also clarifies how small steps can lead to BI someday, for example expanding the EITC instead of food stamps.
How do you deal with the edge cases? Do you eliminate disability programs as well? A lot of Americans are on disability and have <i>much</i> higher income requirements than someone who isn't disabled.<p>Also, what do you do about the difference in cost of living across cities? Do you take the housing allowance, give them a basic income and tell them to move if it's not enough?<p>And what do you do with the small number of people with addiction issues who just blow through the basic income and are left homeless? I highly doubt we're going to tell them "tough, you get to live on the street".
Sometimes the devil is in the details and if you this part<p>"To be revenue-neutral, some people will be worse off with a smooth curve (e.g. those earning $29k getting maximum benefits), and others will be better off (e.g. those who lose $6k of benefits after earning just over $29k). But every dollar earned will lead to improved livelihood."<p>can be finessed in a palatable way. Try to avoid too many you took money from grandma to give to the pot smoking college kid. You sold me on it. The only problem I see how do you convince the voter on disability complaining about the gorvn'ment and all it GD entitlements... and your also talking about the country that's about to elect the guy that wants to ban Muslims from the country.
Has anybody studied the outcomes on American Indian reservations from having basic income guaranteed for generations? I'm not an expert or well-read in this field, but I think anybody advocating basic income would be interested to visit a reservation and observe the lifestyles, dreams, goals, and successes found there.
One of the troubles with this kind of reasoning is it kind of assumes peoples behaviour will remain much the same so someone on a $50k salary will keep at it but maybe with some basic income added and some tax removed and similarly for someone on welfare.<p>And maybe that will be roughly true initially but people change their behaviour and maybe the guy who would have done the $50k job if you give him say $300/week no strings attached will say hey, why slave away when I can go to Bali and surf and smoke joints.<p>We had something like that when I was a kid - the somewhat socialist UK government brought in generous untested welfare and some people used it to hit the beach in Spain and then the remaining workers paying the bills objected.
I'm not sure that combining BI with a flat tax, especially as high as 50% would work out. People with minimum wage or low-paid jobs would have a disincentive to work -- working full time would net them nearly nothing versus staying home, unemployed.<p>Napkin math: 2000 hours (approx full time hours per year) * $7.25/hr (US min wage) * 50% = $7250. Cost of transportation, child care, and other things that wouldn't be required if unemployed could easily eat most of that, netting a wage of just a dollar or two per hour.