A Guaranteed Income for Every American

The choice for the surtax is perverse: a major point of having a UBI as opposed to means-tested social benefit program is to maintain the marginal benefit of additional income; having a "surtax" that reduces the benefit progressively with income that kicks in at a fairly low income level and proceeds to increase up to a level that's still not a high income is a fairly horrible idea that defeats key elements of the basic idea of a UBI.

I'm not a fan of radical big-bang all-at-once UBI replacing other programs swap anyway (favoring a UBI tied to a dedicated revenue stream that displaces means-tested benefit programs as it ramps up, instead) but even among big-bang implementations this is particularly poorly designed.

(1) The "surtax", as discussed above.

(2) Because it relies on electronic deposit to a bank account, it relies on (but does not provide) a solution to the problem of the unbanked.

(3) The decision to apply it only to adults is dubious, but if you are going to have an age-qualified UBI, it should apply at a minimum to all legal adults -- everyone over 18.

(4) The benefit (after deducting the required health insurance purchase, which for those with no other income simply replaces Medicaid, which is eliminated [0]) is below poverty level. Which would make sense as an initial condition of a UBI which was built to grow over time, but this proposal doesn't appear to be -- its a proposal, therefore, to maintain, rather than alleviate, poverty.

(5) Apparently, the author prefers to fund the UBI for everyone largely by continuing the existing regressive, labor-pays-only, payroll taxes (Medicare is flat, Social Security is flat up to a limit, and then capped, making it -- and overall payroll taxes -- regressive overall), whose current regressive structure (including the flat structure of Medicare) is justified based on the idea that they are buy-ins to benefit programs that provide consistent (Medicare) or capped, contribution-determined (Social Security) benefits. Aside from there being no sane rationale that would justify this, it entirely eliminates UBI's utility as a system to help adapt the economy to deal with progressive automation and the dynamics of the labor market moving toward a larger pool of jobs that have lower returns and a narrowing highly (and increasingly-highly) paid pool of elite workers. Moral issues aside, payroll tax structure can't support the author's proposed UBI going forward.

Then again, I suspect that's the author's intent: kill Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., and replace them with something that cannot function in the long term. After all, this is a proposal for a social transfer program from an author who has written an entire book setting out supposedly universal laws that each individually (and, a fortiori, all combined) supposedly justify the conclusion that all social transfers are inherenty harmful and should be eliminated.

[0] The author indicates the healthcare component is too complex to discuss in the article, but this is also a particularly worrying component. Looking at what $3,000 gets you on the health insurance market, this mandatory insurance purchase replacing Medicaid might make the poorest of the poor significantly worse off by itself.

> It seems like your argument is that we can't do it because there are a relatively small number of people who would be better off under the existing system. But by that logic we could never change anything, even if the net benefits are very large, as long as there is anyone who is better off under the status quo.

I think this is an incredibly unfair and callous assessment of what's going on with catastrophic health care coverage. It's not about "the relatively small number of people who would be better off under the existing system." It's about the relatively small number people who are alive under the existing system who would be dead under the proposed one.

Consider someone at the edges of the distribution of healthiness: say, someone born with severe mental and physical disabilities. A universal basic income will never take sufficient care of this person; his or her medical care will cost much much more than average, and there will be medically necessary non-medical care as well. I think we'd like to socialize those costs, using something like SSDI.

> I find it ironic that this individual is for the so called UBI.

Why do you find it ironic? UBI gives people money without telling them what to do with it. It lets the market (i.e. the people) decide what they need instead of the government.

For example, you can imagine a shelter that will provide food, housing and services for the disabled in exchange for their UBI, which doesn't cover the entire cost but covers most of it and the rest is covered by donations.

The UBI proposal in the article (one I find pretty weak, and I'm a huge proponent of UBI) is that you're getting $10k plus healthcare. So there's that.

But.

There is no part of the proposal that covers making sure coverage is equal in value to Medicare - in a private market I'm betting benefits start getting cut post-haste. UBI without universal healthcare is a nightmare, and is all but privatizing Medicare. Surprise!

Also, since children under 18 don't get UBI, they would have to be covered by their parents' $3k/annual buy. But again, privatized "universal" healthcare? No thanks.