birth-muffins-death:What is being said here? Is this complaining that UBI is:Less effective for redi
birth-muffins-death:What is being said here? Is this complaining that UBI is:Less effective for redistribution than existing policies?Better than existing policies but worse than a policy like a negative income tax?Flawed because it does not target the right goals?I get that this is an applause light, but the first article I found with this slogan: (http://www.econlib.org/the-universal-basic-income-a-new-contentious-issue/) was arguing about values, not mathematics. Where’s the appeal to actual math?The Universal Basic Income: Newly Contentious - EconlibCritiquing the numbers behind any particular UBI proposal requires considering the details of what it proposes. @squareallworthy has analyzed a number of them on his blog.Anyway, that article links to a brief Powerpoint presentation that sketches out the basic argument.As for your questions:Better than existing policies but worse than a policy like a negative income tax?A universal basic income (funded by taxes and not manna from heaven) and a negative income tax are mathematically identical. And Caplan (and I agree) considers UBI even worse than existing welfare policies.Less effective for redistribution than existing policies?Flawed because it does not target the right goals?Especially (but not only) from a classical liberal perspective, UBI simply does not do what its advocates claim it can do.Often, it’s pitched as an alternative to the welfare state. Instead of having all this bureaucracy to decide who needs more help and what they should spend it on, why don’t we simplify, give the same amount to everyone, and let individuals prioritize for themselves?But if you abolish all welfare programs, which are currently highly targeted, and pass the money out equally to everyone, then all existing welfare recipients have a massive benefit cut. Because, obviously, instead of giving the money to poor single mothers (and thus to poor children), to the disabled, to the temporarily unemployed (for a limited time), you give money to college students from middle-class families, to adults with no dependents who are perfectly able to work, in sum to people who don’t need the money.Yet you rarely see the advocates reckon with the fact that this is what they’re proposing. According to Ed Dolan, if we abolish all other welfare programs and convert them to UBI, we end up with $4,452. Just how the disabled are going to live and purchase the benefits they now get through Medicare on $4,452 isn’t explained.So others admit that we can’t just exchange existing welfare for UBI; the UBI has to be on top of existing programs or else much higher. And then the question is: how do we pay for that? Again, as @squareallworthy has explained in great detail, the proposals aren’t realistic.Moreover, while proponents of UBI point to “welfare cliffs” and the disincentive to work of the current system, they ignore the far greater disincentives of UBI. As Caplan explains, while some people on existing welfare face a 100% marginal “tax” on their benefits from earning an extra dollar, at the same these programs are targeted mainly at people who cannot work like children and the disabled. For the young and able-bodied, there are almost no programs that don’t come with time limits or work requirements. So it is just not possible to sit around all day and collect welfare.So UBI trades (perhaps) somewhat better incentives for some of the people on it, such as disabled people who can’t work full-time but could pull in 10 hours a week if they weren’t punished for it, for far worse incentives for those currently ineligible for welfare.If you could just not work and go out and buy a home in the countryside with seven roommates where everything is dirt cheap, your little commune could live quite well on $96,000 between you.I always hear it both ways from UBI proponents. On the one hand, of course the UBI won’t discourage people from working, that’s silly! On the other hand, UBI is good because it will free people from the tyranny of wage labor so that they can pursue their true calling, even if it isn’t monetarily remunerative. Well, which one is it?I find the whole thing analogous to politicians who claim they can balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting serves simply by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse”. Well, with UBI the “waste, fraud, and abuse” is supposed to be the bureaucratic overhead of a need-targeted welfare system. But while that overhead exists, just like the “waste, fraud, and abuse” exists, it is not nearly so large as to make “giving money to everyone” anywhere near as efficient for dealing with extreme poverty and want as a system that tries to give money to people who actually need it. -- source link