If you are comfortable with fluctuating minimum wage to control unemployment, you could do the same thing with UBI.

Personally, I don't think that we should to threaten our citizens with homelessness and hunger to get them to be contributing members of society.

I would personally institute UBI gradually, pairing UBI increases with reductions in the minimum wage during economic downturns to stimulate the economy.

If someone is currently on $25k and gets a $10k basic income, their employer can lower their salary to $20k and they'll still be getting $5k more than they were before. (This won't happen immediately because people will be reluctant to take pay cuts, but I think it will in the longer term.)

Exactly how much of this difference the employee and employer capture in the longer term is a concern, but I think giving people the option to quit without starving will go a long way towards empowering them to insist on fair pay. I also think a result would be an increase job quality, because I think a lot of people would take a pay cut to work somewhere less awful if they could afford it.

Of course that money comes from taxes, so there's still a cost somewhere, but I'm not as convinced progressive taxes on the wealthy will have quite as big an impact on the costs to produce basic goods.

It's also a funding nightmare, not because of inflation or free stuff or dis-incentivising working, it's because the sheer amount of money would rival the GDP but the vast majority of people will just get most of it taxed away so that it has a net zero effect.

If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.

Right now a lot of the costs of such jobs are simply externalized to exploited employees - a UBI would cause the wages in those to rise to more fair levels.

"Mucks with" is not a positive term. And to be sure, there are employers for whom the introduction of UBI would be a very negative thing. But there are people (many more, I suspect) who would see UBI as a positive development. These people would not say "it mucks with the incentive structure". They would say "it improves the incentive structure by making it more humane".

Why? Because if you were an employer with a business model that relied on easy access to the bottom end of the labor market, abject fear would cease to be a viable management tool. In a world with lower barriers to quitting you'd no longer be able to pad your margins by exploiting workers in a way that would be inconceivable if they didn't live in constant terror of hunger and homelessness, should they suffer any disruptions in their jobs. To put it more politely, as a manager, you'd have to make more use of carrots and rely less on sticks. This would certainly muck up the game of anyone who relied on nothing but sticks, but again, that would be an improvement in the eyes of many.

Consider, for example, the employers that refuse to give people full-time work to avoid paying benefits while simultaneously refusing to give people regular schedules, which bars them from taking seconds jobs. These employers are demanding full time availability for part time returns, and getting the on-call time for free. This is atrocious. While I can only speculate here, I suspect this practice would be far less common in a world where people desperate enough to put up with this abuse were significantly fewer and further between.

What opponents of UBI must concede is that the end of labor extracted on highly unfavorable terms from people who fear for their very survival does not mean the end of labor in general. As most people on HN know, there are many reasons besides basic survival that motivate people to expend effort. Taking some of the negative power out of employer's hands would re-focus their efforts on developing non-abusive ways to keep people expending effort on their behalf.

That's bad news for managers who lack the ethics to be managers in the first place. It's good news for decent managers who no longer find themselves lumped together with thugs and thieves (and yes, wage-theft is endemic at the lower rungs of the economy).

I should point out, too, that only a fraction of the work that people do is also paid employment. Any mother who works full time raising her kids can attest to this. The same could be said of working out regularly. UBI acknowledges that there are all sorts of socially beneficial activities that require considerable effort, but don't require formal employment by staffed organizations.

At present, when we say "work" what we really mean "work done directly for someone else in exchange for money". It's important to note that while UBI may, indeed, reduce incentives to work directly for terrible people who pay a pittance, it doesn't mean that people will stop working for the good of themselves or others in general. Indeed, given our intrinsically social nature, freeing people from the monsters may lead to a spike in the output of socially beneficial effort.

For these exact same reasons, you also don't need a minimum wage. And you don't need laws about hiring/firing people. If you get fired, it's a hit, but not an existential crisis that requires government intervention. If, as an employer, you offer too low a salary, people simply won't take it. We don't need to ensure that the minimum wage meets some basic standard of living, because you're already guaranteed that by virtue of your humanity.

A UBI raises the minimum to a level where government intervention in the workplace is no longer required to ensure decent treatment of human beings. In so doing, it eliminates deadweight loss of all kinds, from every corner of the market.

The approach that will work in the US is a system of income crediting targeted at lower wage workers. And that will still push up their cost of living, for housing and lower priced used vehicles in particular (which will result in the left attempting aggressive rent controls in cities, which will largely backfire).

It's irrational to give everyone a universal basic income. Scale a wage credit for poorer workers and reduce it as you go up the income brackets. Instead of earning $10/hr, it's $15/hr with the credit; instead of $12/hr, it's $16/hr; instead of $15, it's $18/hr. Make the floor $15; shift the federal minimum wage up to $10. Spend the time and money necessary to research what setup - what bracketing - will work best for the present US economy, and then fix it to be adjusted every few years.

It will also put pressure on wages above those workers. It'll ripple through the pay scales. People just beyond the cutoff will be the most unhappy.

* why not shift the minimum wage up to $15? Because if a worker's labor isn't worth $15/hr, they have no place in the labor force. If you use a credit system, their labor may be worth $7-$10/hr, and they can be subsidized up to eg $15/hr or whatever makes sense. A high minimum wage is regressive by comparison, it chops people off at the knees if their labor value isn't high enough.