We should also have a voluntary charitable UBI. Encourage a culture where everybody contributes what they can to the fund, and then all donations are split equally among all citizens. That money won't be subject to the same political pressures; people who donate will feel good about themselves; and the bureaucracy needed to do this would be minimal.
The only way UBI would work is if the funding source was not Income tax based, and we massively reformed what the role of government is in everyone's life.
Because the only way to create UBI is to take money from other people and redistribute it. Horrible idea. I do not want my hard-earned income and efforts wasted on those who wish to freeload. I'd much rather donate to charities and responsible non-profits, who will do a better job at supporting those who find themselves in tough situations.
That's the way to get bi/multi-partisan support. I support UBI iff we dismantle all (or almost all, like > 95%) of existing government give-money-away programs. I can't imagine that I'm remotely unique in this point of view.
If you're asking for it to be meaningful in amount, universal, and additive atop the existing programs, I think you'll find very little support from the working people who will bear the costs.
I am also a supporter of UBI, however I think much of it should be benefits in kind (universal healthcare, free libraries, decent schools, etc, etc), and perhaps the rest can be structured as a Universal Basic Stake - kindof like a pension scheme that you are already paid into just by being born. Financed by swinging wealth taxes to form a sovereign wealth fund, that is then deployed in the usual capitalistic manner.
Now that's an interesting idea. Starting a UBI in a poor country has to be an awful lot cheaper than starting it in a rich one with a high cost of living; a small charity can do a comparatively large amount of good.
As a taxpayer I would be in favor of a more equitable system where everyone has a line item brought to their attention. There may be a use case for UBI here, everyone gets a stipend or a tax cut that they can use to either get healthcare or not. I'm getting tired of all of the taxes and how easy it is to paint tax payers as evil rich people who need to give more with their hard earned money
That's a terrible way to implement UBI. It causes the dreaded welfare trap where people are incentivized to do nothing. UBI should be unconditional. This makes it much easier to implement, removes the stigma, and most importantly avoids the welfare trap. You want people who rely on welfare to be encouraged to become self sufficient, not trap them in dependence.
I support UBI! I also suspect that we need to go beyond universal benefits into grappling with the reality that different people have different needs. We'll need to agree on a way to discern which society should take on and which are individual.
That's actually one of the arguments for UBI (unconditional basic income) - it would reduce the problem that welfare can't reach many of the people who are supposed to benefit from it but too proud to ask for help. (UBI would also reduce the welfare trap mentioned in the Cato article.)
It sounds like you're arguing in favor of redistribution, and UBI would work as part of that. Some sort of increase in progressive taxation (to fund it) would be the other part.
A variant on UBI that I would like to see explored is to make the payments conditional on doing some kind of community service. Something like cleaning a park or volunteering at a school or something. Maybe a 1-3 hour / week commitment. Not as a way to save money so much as to strengthen communities and give people a way to contribute.
No matter which version of a UBI you support, there's one key feature that I just can't imagine happening out here in the real world. A UBI should REPLACE most existing forms of social assistance. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, some kinds of pensions, some kinds of child support, etc etc etc. Each one of those is a massive public sector industry with a lot of political weight behind it.
I live in Germany, where every market has some form of social assistance connected to it. The task of dismantling that bureaucracy would be outrageous... And quite a lot to spend on a relatively untested scheme like any UBI.
This is why my support for UBI is based on the amount of money given out. If you give out a very small amount then it's not going to a big problem. If you then use it to simplify the tax system, replace it with flat tax, and remove many welfare systems you have a much better system.
Isn't the entire argument for UBI that arbitrary spending money is exactly the best way to provide for people's individual needs? Like a poor person might be healthy and not really need healthcare, but they do need somewhere safe to live.
And you'd give the money to the children's guardians, who can make those decisions on the children's behalf. Maybe they hire a tutor. Maybe they send their kids to a school. Maybe they use the money to offset a stay at home parent.
I don't think UBI makes sense for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist of it, no?
That's exactly what I'd like to see. The problem with UBI is it's not that.
There's room for more than one social program in dire circumstances, but ideally we should have a social structure which incentivizes doing good. Help those who can't help others, and encourage those who can to do so.
I'm strongly in favour of a UBI. It totally makes sense, at least in wealthy Western societies; there's a whole expensive bureaucracy involved in means testing, prosecuting welfare fraud, and so on.
But to make it work, it has to be Universal, i.e. everyone gets it automatically.
The government already issues this amount of money. It's just inefficiently distributed through individual and corporate welfare subsidies. A UBI would replace nearly all of that.
If UBI is not universal there is no point to doing it -- it would just be a complicated welfare system, and we already have one of those, and we certainly shouldn't throw it out just to end up creating another one.
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