India floats the idea of a universal basic income

> If you define your goal as having a specific redistribution scheme, you preclude all the other ways of fixing poverty. As you note, causing the poor to start working is a way to fix poverty - this achieves my goal but not your goal.

There are only two real options. Either they earn enough money or someone gives them the difference. The first is obviously preferable but unless you can do it for everyone you still need the second. If you could somehow have literally everyone earn an unsubsidized living wage then it would actually solve both problems, but there is no known way to do that.

> This does not follow. Europe has less inequality than the US but a higher cost of living. Therefore you can pay a lower UBI in Europe than in the US?

Typically if you have a high cost of living it's because there are some fat cats taking the money and therefore high inequality. What's happening in "low inequality" European countries is that the money is really going to taxes which go to not always very efficient social programs, or is the inefficiency cost of employment laws that prevent employers from downsizing unnecessary workers and so on. If those things were replaced with a UBI then the cost of living there would be lower than it is.

You have a point in that inequality is not the only determinant of cost of living, but it's certainly a large factor.

Let me restate what I'm getting at here. If you have the resources to lift your country's people out of poverty through social programs then you have the resources to do it with a UBI. Because having the money go to the lowest income people is the entire point, and letting it go to everyone is just the same thing as saying that the phase out rate is equal to the tax rate. An explicit phase out on top of taxes is equivalent to charging a higher tax rate to low and middle income people than higher income people, which makes no sense.