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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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Don’t disagree, also pretty close to impossible to have a non distorted market place considering you’re dealing with people, not strictly rational forces. My point is more the perspective from people who may not consider a financial subsidy via UBI to be providing value as it distorts the value of income. I’m not a fan of UBI being “universal” in the sense that people who don’t need it still getting access (it’s main benefit is it simplifies access and avoids needing to prove income), but its certainly simpler and less distorting than say housing vouchers and food subsidies. That being said, I don’t think most people actually care about the well being of those less fortunate and that’s representative in our elected officials.
Regarding the idea of basic income being universal, it makes a lot more sense when you think of income tax and basic income being facets of a single system that decides how much each person owes the government in income tax; basic income is just negative tax. We already have a mechanism for making sure wealthier people pay more: tax brackets. People who don't need basic income automatically end up with a positive tax burden. You could describe it as gradually phasing out basic income for people who make over a certain amount, but that's mathematically equivalent to just adding a tax bracket for low income earners.
The thing I'd really want to avoid is a system where earning an extra dollar can put you over some threshold where lose all your basic income, becoming poorer as a result. A lot of real programs for low-income people work that way, and it creates what's known as a poverty trap, where people can't afford to get out of poverty because getting on a career track that would lead to them not needing benefits anymore leads to a short-term loss of benefits that they can't afford to lose.
To me, it always comes back down to what’s the objective, what’s are the options to solve or improve the results. If the goal is to provide basic fundamental needs for your population, define what basic fundamental needs are: is it housing, food security, a wage where people have the option to save? All of those things are moral, desirable things that I would argue every person on the planet should have. In reality, people are self interested, care about people closest to them or most similar to themselves, and we as a society don’t truly have the conversation about what impact solving that problem would have to their own social stature. Case in point, housing - among several reasons why housing is so scarce is that its in the interest of those with secure housing to limit access to it. I think UBI is similar in that it closes the gap in comparison between the middle class and the lower worker class - there’s a lot of arguably selfish justification for why that poor person deserves to remain poorer than thou. The other question which I personally think is somewhat justifiable, does UBI replace or supplement existing social safety net programs? Do you remove, say housing subsidies when you create a $2000/mo UBI? Does that establish a pricing floor for goods and services? Do businesses reduce their wages by the amount of UBI or do they decide to relocate to a place with lower taxation? Much like universal health care, I really think this is something that needs to be implemented at scale on the federal level due to the relative ease of people and companies relocating to places where their tax burden would be reduced. That being said, its insanity to ban UBI when its essentially just a reform of what we do today - republican posturing is out of control and doesn’t come with any conservative leaning solutions to the same social issues.