> Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black market labor.

I'd say that BI also reduces the incentive to work, but I agree that it does this less than unemployment benefits. Same for black market labor. So a win for BI here.

But there is one other difference where BI is far and far more expensive than unemployment benefit: BI is also paid to people who work. Maybe some BI advocate should try to convince me but to me it looks like this will far outset the advantage above.

Of course BI will require increasing marginal taxes on the people who work. This shouldn't be economically catastrophic though, because you can structure the system such that there aren't disincentives to work and the UBI everyone receives is tax-free.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi...

This is why most BI proponents are so averse to arithmetic.

Calculate the marginal tax rates people would pay under a BI funded by a flat tax vs. the existing welfare system when disqualification from benefits is calculated as a tax. The existing system has low and middle income people paying absurdly high marginal rates. BI would increase their incentive to work.

BI would have high income people paying somewhat higher marginal rates (but not necessarily higher taxes net of BI because they would receive the BI), but high income people are extremely unlikely to give up their high income in exchange for a subsistence level basic income.

The marginal utility changes from working vs not working in a BJ scenario are higher than in a BI scenario, almost by definition. Do you disagree that Utility(No Job, no money) < Utility(No job, money)?

BI would have high income people paying somewhat higher marginal rates (but not necessarily higher taxes net of BI because they would receive the BI)...

More words. Still no arithmetic. Why are BI proponents so averse to actually crunching numbers?

That isn't the interesting question for a basic job. If you replace existing welfare with a basic job then the utility function for working is a binary value which asks if you want to starve to death. You can't actually say no.

But most of the basic jobs are going to be makework jobs with minimal economic value. Things that have economic utility approximately equal to (and possibly less than) sitting on your couch and watching Netflix.

The real question with the basic job is whether people will pick the makework basic job over an actually productive real job. The relevant utility function for a basic job is utility(Basic Job, $10,000) vs. utility(Real Job, $10,000), the equivalent of which for the basic income is utility(No Job, $10,000) vs. utility(Basic Income + Real Job, $20,000). But then the basic job falls on its face because people will too often choose the basic job which is easier to get, has more stability, may be easier to do, etc. The Basic Income doesn't have those problems because in that case the income from the Real Job supplements the Basic Income instead of replacing it, so you get compensated for the amount that getting a real job is worse than not getting one.

A basic income also does a much better thing in the case where people choose not to work for a private business. In the basic job case that person is digging ditches and filling them back in, whereas in the basic income case it can be taking care of their children or writing open source software or doing investigative journalism without a wealthy patron -- choices that are socially beneficial but the basic job doesn't give you.

> More words. Still no arithmetic. Why are BI proponents so averse to actually crunching numbers?

The math and the words both mean the same thing.

You want math, fine. Suppose the economy is full of Adams, Betties and Charlies in equal numbers.

In the hypothetical existing system there is a progressive income tax where you pay nothing up to $50,000 and 20% thereafter.

Adams make $20,000, pay no taxes and receive $6,000 in food/housing government assistance which the government withdraws at a rate of $.80/$1 if the Adam were to make more money.

Betties make $30,000, pay no taxes, are not eligible for any of the food/housing benefits Adams get but receive $4,000 in government college assistance which the government withdraws at a rate of $.50/$1 if the Betty were to make more money.

Charlies make $100,000, pay $10,000 in taxes (20% on everything over $50,000) and receive no government benefits.

Now we throw away the existing welfare and tax system and replace it with a $10,000/year basic income and a flat tax of 20%.

Adams make $20,000 but now receive a $10,000 BI and pay $4,000 (20% of $20K) in taxes. Their net transfers from the government are still $6,000 but now if they make another dollar the government takes 20% instead of 80%.

Betties make $30,000 but now receive a $10,000 BI and pay $6,000 (20% of $30K) in taxes. Their net transfers from the government are still $4,000 but now if they make another dollar the government takes 20% instead of 50%.

Charlies make $100,000 but now receive a $10,000 BI and pay $20,000 (20% of $100K) in taxes. Their net transfers from the government are still -$10,000 and their marginal tax rate is still 20%.

Really? Fixing our crumbling infrastructure isn't valuable? Providing childcare to working mothers is useless? Glad to know there is nothing useful the govt can possibly do with more labor.

But then the basic job falls on its face because people will too often choose the basic job which is easier to get, has more stability, may be easier to do, etc.

This can be resolved by making BJ suck and pay below min wage.

The Basic Income doesn't have those problems because in that case the income from the Real Job supplements the Basic Income instead of replacing it, so you get compensated for the amount that getting a real job is worse than not getting one.

On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring the third option: watch TV all day while collecting money. We already know that free money (typically in the form of welfare and unemployment) induces this behavior.

As for the arithmetic, the question is this: ...BI is far and far more expensive than unemployment benefit: BI is also paid to people who work. Maybe some BI advocate should try to convince me but to me it looks like this will far outset the advantage above.

Your calculations seem to work in your hypothetical society. Do they work on something approximating reality?

Building infrastructure isn't unskilled labor so can't be used as a basic job. Moreover, the fact that the government sometimes needs to hire people to do things doesn't mean they can't do that but only when things actually need doing, and then independently have a basic income.

> Providing childcare to working mothers is useless?

This is what I'm talking about. Let's take some mothers who need to provide for their children and give them jobs digging ditches and filling them back in, then pay some strangers to watch their children while they're doing it. Might it be better to allow mothers to be paid when they take care of their own children?

> Glad to know there is nothing useful the govt can possibly do with more labor.

This is the most basic flaw in the basic job. The government is not qualified to decide this. It's the fallacy of the centrally planned economy that the government is better at allocating labor than individuals.

> This can be resolved by making BJ suck and pay below min wage.

In which case you can't give people jobs doing economically productive things because you have to give them jobs that are more demeaning and loathsome than jobs doing economically productive things, and then they can't actually live on wages below minimum wage so you still need the existing welfare system.

> On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring the third option: watch TV all day while collecting money. We already know that free money (typically in the form of welfare and unemployment) induces this behavior.

...when getting a job causes you to lose the welfare or unemployment benefits.

> As for the arithmetic, the question is this: ...BI is far and far more expensive than unemployment benefit: BI is also paid to people who work. Maybe some BI advocate should try to convince me but to me it looks like this will far outset the advantage above.

If the average person pays $10,000 more in taxes to fund a basic income and then receives the $10,000 basic income, it didn't cost them $10,000, it's just a no-op.

> Your calculations seem to work in your hypothetical society. Do they work on something approximating reality?

Please specify what part of the calculations you find unrealistic.

Obviously the numbers there are chosen to balance exactly so that nobody loses or gains anything and in practice throwing out a huge system with complicated rules and then replacing it with something simpler is going to have winners and losers. But the general principle that wealthier people pay more taxes than they receive benefits and poorer people receive more benefits than they pay taxes will continue to hold and the result will be lower marginal tax rates on effectively everyone (or, if BI is large enough that the new system is more redistributive than the existing one, everyone other than high income people).

FDR did exactly that.

Let's take some mothers who need to provide for their children and give them jobs digging ditches and filling them back in, then pay some strangers to watch their children while they're doing it. Might it be better to allow mothers to be paid when they take care of their own children?

Or, lets have one mother watch 4 children - her own and those of 3 strangers. This is a common arrangement in most of the world. Are Americans just somehow less capable than Indians, Mexicans, Peruvians and South Africans?

Please specify what part of the calculations you find unrealistic. Obviously the numbers there are chosen to balance exactly

So now take the actual distribution of income in the US (rather than a hypothetical one) and calculate what numbers would be necessary to balance exactly.

And a lot of those people died.

"Building infrastructure" is also not a long-term plan. We need it right now because we haven't seriously invested in infrastructure in three generations, but if we spent 10 years building all new bridges then we would be good for another three generations again. Which would be great, but then what?

> Or, lets have one mother watch 4 children - her own and those of 3 strangers. This is a common arrangement in most of the world. Are Americans just somehow less capable than Indians, Mexicans, Peruvians and South Africans?

Which the mother receiving the basic income can still do in return for money or favors or in kind services. But with the basic job, at some point the government says we have enough people providing daycare and you're digging ditches all day even if you would prefer to be raising your kids.

And notice how those arrangements work in other countries (and here for that matter) -- you watch all the kids today, someone else watches all the kids tomorrow. When you're not watching the kids you're washing clothes or doing errands or preparing food. And people tend to be much happier when they're doing that kind of work for their own families and communities than doing it for rude strangers at minimum wage.

> So now take the actual distribution of income in the US (rather than a hypothetical one) and calculate what numbers would be necessary to balance exactly.

OK, let's see. Mean household income is $72,641, there are 122,952K households so total income is $8,931,356,232K, therefore providing a $10,000 basic income for 245M adults would require a flat tax rate of ~27.43%. Or if you like a progressive tax then maybe a 20% bracket and a 30% bracket. And that rate is an overestimate because it doesn't include any revenue from corporate taxes.

And that's ignoring taxes needed to fund a functioning government - e.g. roads, law enforcement, blowing up Afghani weddings, etc. So 65-70% flat tax rates? Or just a 37-42% tax rate, plus we've cut wealth transfers in half? Concretely, which one are you proposing?

(Incidentally corporate taxes are just taxes on people, merely hidden from view.)

No it doesn't. You haven't explained where you got your numbers but those numbers are presumably for a household rather than an individual (which would then receive more than one basic income) or some atypical edge case where a person qualifies for an uncharacteristically large collection of benefits.

A basic income is a pure redistributive program. It can't possibly cost more than a program which is more redistributive than it is because there is nowhere else for the rest of the money to go.

> And that's ignoring taxes needed to fund a functioning government - e.g. roads, law enforcement, blowing up Afghani weddings, etc.

All of that other than the military costs a comparatively small amount of money. And we could probably stand to blow up not so many weddings as we do.

> (Incidentally corporate taxes are just taxes on people, merely hidden from view.)

That doesn't mean including it wouldn't reduce the rate. US GDP is $16.7T. Total US personal income from above was $8.9T. That's quite a difference. An economy-wide flat tax would require a rate of ~14.7% for $10,000 per adult and ~29.3% for your unrealistically high $20,000.

And keep in mind that that is the marginal rate. The effective rate under a basic income is lower than that for everyone. If you make $60,000 and pay 15% but get a $10,000 basic income then your effective tax rate is negative, as it is at a 30% rate and $20,000.

That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want".

Putting aside market failures for a moment, work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done. There are lots of people who will happily churn out poems about their personal angst all day if they had the opportunity to do so and call it 'work' but if nobody wants to buy their poems then it's not considered economic productivity. And it must be this way as otherwise you could get idiotic situations like someone who just goes running every day and says they were "productive" because they did "work", ignoring that it was income free because it didn't help anyone else. At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless.

I used the wrong word, I meant 'overall economic production'. Economic participation is falling during this "recovery", and that is not just due to baby boomers aging: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemplo...

> work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done

I disagree, but I think this disagreement boils down to underlying problems I see with the ways in which we tend to measure economic output and GDP.

If I write a poem that brings me no pleasure and I sell it to you, and you write a poem that brings you no pleasure and you sell it to me. That "counts" as economic productions. However, if I write a poem that brings me pleasure and you write a poem that brings you pleasure and nothing is sold, the same value is produced but it doesn't "count" towards economic production.

You may not like poetry, but there are tons of other examples:

Grandparents who babysit their grandchildren, people who fix their own cars, people who grow and cook their own food, people who write open source software, people who volunteer with non-profits, the list goes on and on.

> At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless.

While it is hard to measure productive work that isn't tied to the exchange of goods or services, that doesn't make that work meaningless, nor does it mean it has no value.

Conversely, I would argue that there is a large amount of "unproductive work" or "busy work" that doesn't really produce value, but does involve the exchange of goods and services. Specific examples are controversial, but some potential ones are: fighting frivolous lawsuits, political fundraising, defensive patents, and many types of advertising.

see: https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-job...

I think many of these many of these jobs provide "competitive advantage" in marketplace but produce little to no actual value to society. Every corporation needs someone doing these jobs so they can stay competitive, but it ends up becoming an arms race of economic waste.

My hope is that by reducing the necessity of work that get paid well, we are able to start weeding out some of the BS work and enabling people to do more of the less/un paid work that produces hard to measure value.

I think we should accomplish this by incrementally phasing in basic income pair with gradually phasing out minimum wage. Each increment should happen at the start of a recession so the the increase in government spending on BI paired with the availability of cheaper labor (due to lower minimum wage) can prompt growth and shorten the recession.