What Is the Point of Universal Basic Income?

I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal.

In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory.

If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it.

But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income.

One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.

That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares.

If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box.

While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.