Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

  The fact there's a section of the population who
  believes that poor people won't turn to crime
  before starving to death simply amazes me.

Who believes this?

> But we don't have long term structural unemployment.

No, we have (arguably) the early phases of an economic revolution with rapid changes in the kinds of jobs in demand (which is the other thing I mentioned), long-term structural unemployment is a speculated future issue, both of those (as short and longer term concerns) are issues that are usually cited as motivations for UBI (personally, I'm more interested in the former than the latter, at least in the form of "unemployment" in the strict sense, rather than "decline in the relative value of the median hour of labor".)

You can disagree that either is something we ought to address, but by (earlier in the thread) presenting an alternative solution to BI, you are implicitly agreeing with the problem it is being offered to solve.

> We actually currently have a scarcity of labor

If we had a simple scarcity of labor, you'd see rapid, across the board increases in the market clearing cost of labor, you do not. We may have a scarcity of certain skills, but that's a problem that while a mature UBI addresses (by making it more possible for people to take time for retraining in the hope of future wage gains), a Basic Job as you have proposed does not.

> and BI makes this problem worse (about twice as bad as the great recession did).

The great recession didn't produce a scarcity of labor, it produced a surplus of labor. So "makes this problem worse (about twice as bad as the great recession did)" is simply incoherent.

Anyhow, the experiment you point to is not a BI, its a Minimum Income (a traditional, means-tested welfare program, with a 50% fall-off for outside income and the associated reduced incentive for outside income-earning activities, including work -- the central problem with means-tested benefit programs that UBI is directed at solving.)

Claiming that an experiment with the exact feature of traditional, means-tested welfare programs that UBI proponents point to as a reduced incentive to work that shows that such a program does, in fact, reduce work by some specific amount as proof that a UBI at the same level would reduce incentive to work by the same amount is unjustifiable.

> EITC increases incentives to work

EITC increases incentive to earn additional income within a narrow range at the bottom, has no effect on incentives just above that range for another narrow range, and then decreases incentives to earn additional income within another narrow range, and then has no additional effect above that range.

It increases the incentives for work at a minimal income, and somewhat decreases the incentives for moving beyond that for people who can achieve that but don't see a path to a very large increase.

> Welfare and BI have the opposite effect.

Even granting, arguendo, that that's true, the key issue in evaluating proposals to replace means-tested welfare programs with BI is the relative effect of the means-tested programs replaced vs. the BI replacement.

How are you so sure that I'm not part of the majority that faces systemic discrimination? I can tell you right now if I had applied to university in the same town I went to college in I would be discriminated against - I don't match the race or gender of the average student in my town if that's what you mean…

> There are many voices i hear who believe people above certain limits should be taxed 90% or more, and some cutoff limits Ive heard have been 250k, or even 100k.

Sorry, but I don't believe that there are many voices, in the context of the national conversation espousing such views and they certainly wouldn't get a whiff of being elected if they ran for government. It's hard to not take what you say as fear-mongering when you resort to that kind of hyperbole.

> The problems would be that the real implementation of basic income will never be as simple as proposed. We would start out by saying every adult will get a fixed amount. Then the question comes out about people with disabilities needing extra money for their care. So we carve out an exception.

Or, more likely, we don't include disability programs (which are not purely or primarily means-tested programs) as among the primarily-means-tested programs that are replaced by UBI in the first place. To the extent that improvements are needed in disability programs, they come from elsewhere.

(OTOH, part of the problem creating incentive for disability fraud is secondary testing in primarily means-tested benefit programs, which leaves lots of gaps in basic poverty support.)

> What about parents who squander the money and the detrimental effects on their kids. Do we let the kids starve?

We deal with child neglect through child welfare systems, not social benefit systems.

> What about kids in foster care?

What about them?

> What if parents have lots of kids?

Then...they have lots of kids.

> Should kids also get a basic income?

Pretty obviously, yes, kids should get basic income (if nothing else, most of the primarily means-tested social benefit programs -- both welfare and EITC -- in the country are support programs for parents with dependent children that are strongly scaled by the number of dependent children, so if you want a system that does at least as good for current targets of benefits while removing the adverse effects, the obvious methods is that kids should be included as beneficiaries. There are a few programs that are not targeting such families -- e.g., General Assistance programs, but they are small both in their per-beneficiary benefits and their aggregate costs as a share of overall social welfare spending.)

The most sensible way to do a UBI is probably "all citizens and legal permanent residents".

> As we add more and more exceptions there are more opportunities for abuse of the system.

The whole point of the "U" in UBI is that you don't add exceptions. You define a broad universe of recipients with as few qualifications as you can sensibly make, and everyone within that universe gets the same benefit.