> Of course it's a problem and of course it makes a difference. The result is that tax take remains unchanged and the burden of paying for additional social assistance goes up. This is a matter of elementary arithmetic; I find it genuinely mindboggling that someone can get this deep into a thread arguing in favour of welfare reform without being able to grasp it.
You cannot evaluate a tax system without accounting for the benefits it pays for or vice versa. Taking $1 from a person or family in tax and then giving them back $1 in cash benefits doesn't "cost" $1. That is why it isn't a problem -- someone with average wealth who both pays taxes and receives benefits is completely unproblematic because their UBI is paid for by their own taxes.
It doesn't help them to simultaneously reduce their UBI and lower their taxes in the same amounts, and in practice the attempts to do that will hurt them because the cumulative withdrawal of independent benefits programs will be more than the tax reduction applied to median income people, with the balance going to tax reductions for higher income people.
> Sure, you cut that deficit by raising taxes on everyone, but this penalises families with multiple earners and rewards families where only one member needs to work since the new social assistance they get exceeds the increased tax burden on their sole breadwinner. And it's the latter group where that generally has less debt, lower cost of living and/or more of the assets they want already paid for; hence the other family members not seeking work.
The latter, wealthier family has or will also pay higher taxes which balances it out. And providing benefits to single income families serves the equivalent purpose to providing deductions for dependents and collecting lower taxes for married filing jointly than single, which can then be gotten rid of. It simplifies the tax code which makes it harder to cheat.
> If you want to avoid giving the impression UBI is robbing the workaholic middle classes to pay for the idle asset-rich, funding it with a consumption tax (even if it were possible, given shifting the tax burden from consumption to income tax implies massive tax breaks to the low propensity-to-consume rich paying the majority of today's tax) is certainly not the way to go.
This argument has been false every time anyone has ever made it.
There are two categories of "upper income" people. The first is upper income working professionals who do spend substantially all of their income and your point doesn't apply to, and the second is the even richer investment class who only pay income tax on the money that they actually spend because the remainder of their assets are unrealized capital gains which they never have to sell or pay tax on until they actually want to spend the money. And the richest families play the same international shell games that large corporations do which allow them to avoid taxes even then. Switch to a consumption tax and when they buy a plane they pay the tax, instead of borrowing the money from their own corporation in a tax haven and then deducting the interest on the self-loan as a business expense.
> If you want to incentivise stay-at-home parenting, you create subsidies for stay-at-home parents; there's no need to also subsidise childless people staying at home because they don't actually need the money at the same time.
Why should we penalize the domestic labor of a couple who is unable to conceive children over one that is? Should we not value homemakers who support their spouses and organize social gatherings and build strong communities just because they have no children [yet]?
> hungry people should either apply for the benefits and demonstrate willingness to apply for jobs that are suggested to them or (they or their carers) should provide certification that they're not mentally or physically capable of work.
That doesn't fix it.
The problem is this: There are, say, 20 million unskilled workers and 10 million unskilled jobs willing to pay a living wage (and this is likely to get worse). "Go find a job" doesn't scale. It doesn't matter which half of them have one of the jobs, the other half won't. Demanding that people go on a snipe hunt is a cruel joke.
The only way to give move of them jobs is to reduce the minimum wage to the market-clearing price, which is less than a living wage. Then they starve without social assistance. But if you give social assistance with a high phase out then you're imposing a high marginal tax rate on low income people and creating a poverty trap. And social assistance with a low phase out is equivalent to a UBI with a flat tax rate equal to the phase out rate.
> But a few dishonest people risking jail for fraud costs a lot less than paying many people who have no intention of applying for welfare - fraudulently or otherwise - but certainly wouldn't refuse it if it was thrust upon them.
Which is problematic, because people who qualify for it should receive it. Screw letting people starve -- and letting their kids starve -- because they're too proud to ask for help.
> If false negatives are a major problem you can skew the government bureaucracy in favour of approving virtually every request and it'd still cost less than indiscriminate payouts.
If you combine this with the elimination of the minimum wage which is actually necessary to get these people working, there wouldn't be "negatives" anymore. There barely are now. The childless "non-working" spouse you didn't want receiving anything is actually working for in-kind services. It's real work, it should qualify as a job. Likewise "not working" because you're taking care of your sick brother, or tutoring the neighbor's kid in exchange for sandwiches, or most of the other things people do when they're not working a formal 9-5 job.
If your system is only "more efficient" because it discourages qualifying beneficiaries from receiving benefits, that isn't efficiency. A thermostat that will only heat your house to 10°C might save you in heating costs, but that isn't efficient, it's just defective.