Except: 1) UBI is unproven and 2) it strikes me as a bit of a band-aid solution designed mainly to avoid confronting certain ideological assumptions.

> There are big political issues with achieving UBI. One of them is reversing that notion.

So, in other words, we're fucked. I don't think an economy where the majority people are economically unproductive and lack an ownership claim will be survivable for those people, and that seems like what UBI would be.

I think the trajectory will be something like one of these:

1. We keep our current economic system and ideology, maybe tack on UBI, and the unemployed are eventually slowly (or quickly) escorted out of existence. At some point the people who still contribute to the economy will get tired of paying so much to support the unemployed, and will use their de-facto monopoly on economic power to stop. The method most compatible with our prevalent moral frameworks is suppressing reproduction of people supported by UBI.

2. Some kind of outright socialism/communism. The idea of individual ownership is abolished or severely curtailed, and all capital is managed by some centrally-planned authority a-la the Soviet Union. Basically, you have no option except live on UBI. There's still some chance of the unemployed being escorted out of existence, if the political authority can be hijacked by an authoritarian who wants to get rid of them.

3. There's some kind of luddite ban on "too much" automation, or an Amish-like control and suppression of technology based on its adverse cultural impacts.

The capital will just flee to other places if they do that. In fact it already does.

But I agree, UBI will never work. It will just generate inflation and drive prices up, like the Biden Administration's America Rescue Plan did by giving away $1400 checks to people.

I know it's not an apples to apples comparison with any proposed UBI implementation, but looking at the social upheaval caused by the COVID-19 quarantine and stimulus programs, I'd say cutting a check to people and leaving a void in their life where work used to be is a fertile breeding ground for aimless people who will be easily radicalized. It's not something I ever considered pre-2020 as a big proponent of UBI, but now I feel it's something that has to give us concern.

Just because you can't imagine what people will do after physical labor is antiquated doesn't mean the average person, who you underestimate as a bumbling fool, will not come up with ways to earn an income.

Well, I strongly doubt that a UBI that could actually achieve that is actually sustainable in the near term, especially absent a concrete policy that prevents zoning and other related policies from being used to prevent adequate housing affordable to those made more theoretically able to afford it by the UBI from being produced.

And I'm kind of an enthusiastic backer of UBI as a general concept after spending considerable time looking into it and thinking about how to make it work; I suspect that a lot of the working class is going to be even more skeptical of "free money" promises to start with.

Rich people don't destroy jobs, efficiency / innovation / increases in productivity destroy jobs. Society doesn't need jobs that are no longer required, and it makes no sense to pay people for things that can easily be done by a machine.

Now, that said, the problem you describe is real and it is an issue. But I don't know what a viable solution aside from a properly implemented UBI would be.

Because either that reduces total wages for everyone, or it makes more people permanently unemployable by raising the cost floor per unit of labor value.

Also, you can't reduce working hours for everyone, only the currently employed, and in practice reliably only the near-full-time-employed-on-hourly-wages.

> The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices

Not really, since UBI funded by progressive tax increases compresses post-policy incomes rather than raising them uniformly. You'd need ironclad market segmentation that survives income distribution compression to “capture” any groups increase in post-policy income, and if you have that, you can just take all of that groups income anyway, which is a problem that needs addressed independently of whether UBI is adopted.

You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month, to say nothing of arrangements that involve roommates or shared facilities or couples who would then have a second UBI.

> I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.

You're forgetting the possibility for supplemental income. Combine the UBI with a part time job and you could live just outside of New York City and spend the other half of your time on the business for as long as it takes until it makes enough for you to quit the part time job.

There is also a whole lot of work that really doesn't care about location at all. You can do software development in Kansas if you want to, as well as anything else that involves selling your product over the internet.

> Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes)

The marginal rate isn't what causes revolts, it's the effective rate. Middle class people don't care about paying $12,000 in tax if they also get a $12,000 UBI. Upper middle class people aren't going to revolt over a difference between the two of an amount similar to what they pay already for the existing welfare system we would no longer need.

And the whole point of using VAT is that billionaires and international corporations can't avoid it.

This is a bad idea. A phase-out is indistinguishable from a tax in the same amount, but it harder to reason about and consequently tends to be implemented incoherently.

Suppose you have $10,000 basic income with a 20% phase-out rate and a progressive income tax with a 15% tax rate up to $50,000 and 25% thereafter. Then what you really have is a $10,000 UBI and an income tax of 35% up to $50,000 and 25% thereafter. Probably not what you wanted, right?

Much better to have a $10,000 UBI with no phase out and a flat 30% tax rate. Which has the added benefit of vastly simplifying the tax system -- no need for multiple rates and all the complexity and opportunities for tax avoidance that go with them.

That would only be true if you adopted a monumentally stupid funding model, so I'd recommend if you adopt UBI, you don't do that. The most sensible funding models involve new high-end taxes to fund basic income (wealth or property taxes with a broad exemption that would leave out most of the lower, working, and middle classes seem a popular idea recently, though I personally prefer, to give the short form, to at least start with equalizing taxes across forms of income to remove the preference for capital and other non-labor income).

> UBI removes the incentive to work for a lot of people who are comfortable being at the base level of subsistence it allows.

People are more than happy to put additional effort into increasing labor income when already working considerably and earning more than a subsistence level, so I find that argument specious ab initio, moreover, UBI, to the extent it replaces existing support programs that create disincentives to additional income, would actually increase the incentive to earn outside income, and reduce barriers to doing so.

> Now UBI is a form of central planning.

Even if you can stretch the definition of the latter so that's a sensible statement, its certainly less central planning than traditional means- and behaviorally-tested social welfare systems by any sane standard, so if it in anyway (even by simply counting as income against those systems qualifications) displaces such systems, it reduces the role of central planning in the economy.

Yeah, this is why I am against a UBI that is based on living costs. If you are going to divide society along those who work and those who don't you can't mix and match them in the same region. They'll have to live in cheaper places with less opportunity to make it easier for those who do decide to work. The idea that people live in SF on UBI without working while they push workers out is absurd. It would be a dysfunctional system that collapses on itself.

Sure, if you want to live on a UBI exclusively go to Florida and find a nice and quiet community in a cheap location.

Except that this isn't how UBI should be implemented. An easy way to do it is to change Federal income taxes. Make $0/year? your tax bill is -$12000. Make $10000? perhaps it's now -$10000. And at some point - probably $40000 or $50000, it's 0, and then after that you pay gradually increasing taxes, the way it currently works.

so in other words, you don't have to give this cash to all 300M people. T(Though you do need to account for the fact that having this option available will change people's life choices, if we're going to estimate the funding needed)

Probably we'd also need to raise taxes somewhere to fund it - increasing marginal tax rates for higher tax brackets, possibly coupled with some new tax brackets at the upper end, seems like a possible answer.

Realistic UBI proposals wouldn’t exactly provide a comfortable wage. They’d provide just enough to get by on the basics, if that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful, but it does mean that it won’t be an attractive alternative to work for anyone who isn’t comfortable staying poor forever.

UBI would still be a safety net, not an attractive alternative to working. The idea that UBI would enable people to become free of work and follow their dreams for free has been greatly exaggerated. It’s just not possible to tax enough to pay everyone high UBI wages. Safety net wages, maybe, but it won’t be a fun living situation to depend entirely on UBI.

And as a result, money will devalue, and rents will go up. So long as UBI recipients are competing with each other over housing, that's how it will work.

> since UBI as "proposed" my comment would replace other safety nets like unemployment benefits.

If UBI is universal, why would unemployment benefits be cut? wouldn't that mean the unemployed get comparatively less?

> to pay for the rest of UBI you wouldn't just print money but instead raise taxes

The problem with this is that tax rates now follow from UBI.

Previously we might say "The tax people pay is X% of income".

Now we pay a fixed sum $Y to everyone and we need to make up for $Y * P ; where P is the size of the population.

that means the average tax payed needs to be $Y per person. This obviously can't be equally distributed (otherwise Y = 0) but now the relative tax rate depends explicitly on population size. You've just moved the goalpost by making income less relevant, and citizenship more relevant; Now every new immigrant making less than average wage, increases the tax rate for everyone making more than average wage. Instead of opposing tax rates, the wealthy will oppose immigration rates.

The benefit of not guaranteeing tax-derived UBI, is that no one has to care who enters the country, b/c it doesn't have any effect on them.

I disagree - a UBI means that anyone who's able to live frugally may, at any time, retire. This gives enormous bargaining power to workers, as if the pay is too low then they can say "fuck it, I'm moving to <insert rural ghost town>, buying an abandoned house for $1, and living off my UBI".

Not only does this put downward pressure on rent, it also encourages jobs to be more available in rural areas, as people will move to there for lower costs of living instead of moving away because it's unaffordable due to lack of jobs/UBI.

Your wage is not determined by your productivity, it's determined by your bargaining power (your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) being the main one, but how unique your skills are determines your employer's BATNA).

In other words, employers will employ you for any amount that still lets them make a profit off of your labour, but they will pay you the least they can get away with paying without you walking away. Some people literally can't afford to walk away, and they're the people who are paid dogshit wages. A UBI would let them walk away until their job calls them with a good offer.

I don't think you understand UBI, how it is intended to work, or the economics around it.

> Let's say we give everyone $50K.

$50K is ludicrously high for an early UBI implementation. The ambitious advocates target a per-person level that would hit at or near the federal poverty line (the more cautious advocates see getting up even to that level as a longer-term goal.)

> Why not $50 billion? I'm being serious - the same effect ends up happening -- prices increase proportionately

No, they don't. First, because all actual UBI proposals are redistributive (whether the money comes from existing social benefit programs including the government employees/contractors managing them being cut, or whether it comes from new taxes, or from some combination. So it doesn't change the supply of money, just where it is.)

Its true that goods disproportionately demanded by the portion of the population receiving a net benefit from the implementation of the UBI can be expected to increase, but under any reasonable expectations these increases will generally be less, proportionally, than the increase in income. So, there will be a net increase in utility for the net income gainers, though somewhat less than would be expected if you considered pre-UBI price levels.

But also because one purpose of UBI is to reduced the disincentive to work created by means-tested social benefit programs, where some portion of the income provided by work is lost in benefits. (In some proposals, UBI would also reduce the barrier to mutually-beneficial employment at low wages provided by minimum wage laws.)

Bill Gates works, but he doesn't work as a janitor. Who is going to scrub the toilets for a meager supplement to a guaranteed living wage?

I think that isn't a correct assumption either.

40 yeas is a long time. Longer than many HN readers here have been alive.

In the last 40 years, how many times has the government performed an about-face on some economic policy or whatever? Too many times for someone to just throw away their career until sufficient time has passed that is becomes part of society. That may take an entire generation (see Social Security in the US, which now is a permanent fixture).