Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have?

~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the extremely high (often >80%) effective marginal tax rates. It was supposed to automatically give people the benefits they are entitled to, without having to deal with the punitive bureaucracy. It was supposed to help people who fall between the categories in the existing welfare system. And so on.

And it was supposed to be funded by making it an accounting technicality, at least for the most part. Most basic welfare benefits, tax credits, and tax deductions would go away. Progressive taxation would go away. Standard deduction would either go away or become substantially smaller. And the highest income tax bracket would start at 0.

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elevatortrim 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Everything you say is still the idea and I agree but where does the idea that progressive taxation would go away coming from? What does it have to do with UBI?

	▲	AnthonyMouse 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying different marginal rates. Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each other out -- lower income people are supposed to pay lower marginal tax rates but if you're paying a 10% marginal tax rate and then have a 25% benefits phase out rate, that's the same as paying a 35% marginal tax rate. Worse, the benefits phase outs often overlap, with the result that lower income people are often paying higher marginal tax rates than wealthy people, and there are some cases when their marginal rates even exceed 100% of marginal income. So you have two unnecessarily complicated systems that mostly exist to cancel each other out, and to the extent that they don't they're doing something you don't actually want (excessively high marginal rates on poor people). It's better to just get rid of both -- no phase outs is the "universal" part of the UBI, and then you combine that with a uniform marginal tax rate for everyone.

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AnthonyMouse 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's exactly what it's supposed to be, but then opponents (or just people who are confused) will often characterize it as something else which is easier to find fault with.

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Izkata 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All of that sounds nice, but the current understanding is what fell out when people started questioning the specifics of how all of that would work.

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nout an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The current UBI frame is nothing like what you said. And I think this is the issue with UBI - the incentives are not aligned for it to be stable and reasonable over time, but rather to get much worse and misused over time.