Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

Why the hell should I pay even more and subsidize those who have more than two kids?

Of course, but there's still the "minimum profitability" that a business seeks to have. Suppose three firms compete to sell widget X, and consumers are willing to pay up to $10 for it, but the companies sell it at $5 due to competition (it costs $4 to make and distribute). Then the price is determined by supply cost + reasonable profit, determined by competition. If the government removes part of that profit, they'll raise prices accordingly, and sell for $6 instead, since that's still within the demand price elasticity -- otherwise the firms would decide there wasn't enough profit and get out of the business entirely.

> No more than taxing labor income... is really taxing corporate stockholders

The difference is that taxing labor income can be intentionally progressive, which is widely believed to be a good thing.

> But taxing high salaries is "regressive"

That just doesn't make any sense -- words can't be redefined like that. The very definition of progressive taxation is taxing high salaries (EDIT: incomes) of individuals at a higher rate than lower ones.

I understand your overall argument -- it's certainly debatable to what extent you believe corporate taxes to affect prices, vs to what extent you believe personal income tax to affect market salaries. But that doesn't affect the point I was making, which is that corporate taxes are ultimately passed onto people, and that this is not done in a progressive way. But by taxing people directly instead, this can be done progressively.

If I live in a mansion in that Grover, NC, would you say that my expenses were high so I deserve more basic income?

High prices are the market telling you to consider looking someplace else to live.

This is how the good ideas of progressive intellectuals get destroyed: other progressives want to weigh them down with all sorts of other social engineering baggage. (Conservative intellectuals have good ideas that get destroyed by other conservatives, too.)

Its seems to me to be self-evidentally economically impossible for universal BI to do this (which, incidentally, means it probably can't replace all existing social benefit programs, because you probably still want to have some programs that people can live on without a drain on savings, though these would need to be time limited and almost certainly have other qualifications) unless we've reached that point of labor-irrelevance.

If you set the level of BI such that it would allow such comfortable living given pre-BI prices, the resulting effect on prices would quickly drive such comfortable living back out of reach for those relying solely on BI.

You can mitigate poverty and economic inequality with BI, because the inflationary effects will be no greater than the income boost given at the low end of the scale, but there is a declining marginal benefit of each additional dollar of BI.

You can go look up economics papers on Google Scholar or SSRN about the benefits of direct payments versus in-kind payments. You might worry that someone will use their direct payment and spend it on hooch, but you can't stop that: if you give them food stamps they will trade that for money and then spend it on hooch.