Oh? I won't claim to be an expert (or even close), but it seems to me that remove the vast majority of the overhead of the current web of social programs with a far more simple "Has this person gotten their $X" would free up a bunch of money, even if $X is given to vastly more people. (And I believe that most social programs are relatively efficiently run - those that disagree would consider the benefit of closing the programs to be greater)

That said, theorycrafting isn't numbers.

Today the US population is roughly 350 million, and we spend 927 billion on social programs between state and federal. That works out to $2800 and change spent per person. (assuming my numbers are correct) That's, as you say, not nearly enough.

Okay, perhaps we can say some large portion of that population is children that would cost less. also families can benefit from shared housing. So let's switch to a theoretical family of four model. For ease of calculations, let's assume large families and small families balance out: $11,200 per (theoretical) family of 4...which isn't the individual poverty line.

So....yeah, you seem to be totally correct. Which makes me wonder what numbers those libertarians in favor of UBI are using?

It doesn't seem particularly hard to me. You raise taxes slightly to claw back the UBI from people making significantly larger amounts of money.

Actually, how I would implement it is as a refundable tax credit in place of the basic deduction. In other words, if you have no income you receive your full UBI. However, you are taxed on your first dollar of income (rather than getting a tax free threshold as you do today). There is still an incentive to work as you still get to keep 75% (or whatever) of every dollar you earn on top of the basic income, but at some point the amount of tax paid exceeds the amount of UBI received, and you become a net tax payer.

EDIT: The point is that by working the numbers, you can have everyone wind up in roughly the same financial position as today except without the overhead of the various social programs.

You receive your full UBI for the year all at once at tax time? That seems like a recipe for disaster.

Lets say you get $500/month to every adult citizen... and $100-300/month (varies by number/age of children) for every dependent child., for a family of four, that winds up being lets say $1500/month. For a year, that would be $18,000/year. The average U.S. income is $52k.. meaning that a flat tax rate of at least 40% would be needed to cover such a system, as well as what's left of the govt.

I might be persuaded to do that, if it meant that pretty much all social programs go away, and that a lot of laws, agencies, regulation, subsidies and even military spending were cut. With a target of cutting the federal budget by 70%. If course it feels like I have that much coming out of my paycheck already.

Two things to keep in mind:

1) Even if the marginal tax rate is fairly high, your average income earner will be getting that $18000 back in UBI which makes the effective rate in your scenario more like 5%.

2) The majority of tax revenue comes from the highest earners. A quick google gave me this (from https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...):

The top 1 percent (1.3 million filers) paid a greater share of income taxes (37.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent (124.5 million filers) combined (30.2 percent).

In other words, I don't believe your math is a reasonable approximation of how the budget would work out. If everyone pays the same effective rate as today (including welfare and other social program recipients who can be treated as having a negative effective rate), nothing changes. Also, there is no need to presume a flat tax rate; the U.S. does not have a flat tax rate, now.

EDIT: Also the average household size in the U.S. is 2.53 people, not 4. A naive calculation would suggest that a household of 4 should therefore expect a mean income around $83K.

Details to be worked out. :)

No, of course, I would not propose that. There are many ways to handle it that effectively amount to the same thing. The UBI could be paid out monthly or fortnightly or whatever seemed good with the tax situation otherwise being the same. Your employer would have to withhold a bit more tax to compensate, but the end result would be the same.

The point is not to argue specific implementation details; it is to offer another way of thinking about it.

Income tax would need to be 40-60% flat to cover such a system.

Even if it isn't cheaper, the costs are better to plan around.

We have an entire bureaucracy centered around benefits and making sure if folks have cheated their benefits. I'm sure we'll need some of the bureaucracy still, but it'll mostly be issues receiving their pay instead of having to screen everyone. Fraud will be more limited in scope because there will be fewer ways to commit this sort of fraud (identity theft, not reporting death, and folks inadvertently recieving double payments most commonly).

We'll still need some social programs. UBI simply won't be enough for some folks unless someplace has cheap, affordable healthcare. Otherwise, folks with expensive health needs still need some support. Yes, this will cost some money, but other folks will simply be able to retire and live off the UBI with no intervention. I'm pretty sure this will be cheaper than the current system. This likely goes down or away completely if everyone has healthcare they can afford.

We'll no longer need to maintain things like the SNAP system (food stamps) because this will simply be included in the UBI. You'll no longer have a seperate card to pay for whatever portion of your groceries are included. We can use existing infrastructure for the UBI payments like we already do for other cash benefits.

We could likely have more staighfoward payroll taxes and less paperwork to fill out with those, both on the government side and the employer side. I'm guessing there are other things I haven't looked over. I think overall we'll have fewer employed in this. Now, there will be the cost of the actual money plus distributing it to everyone in the country. This might make up for the savings above, I don't know as I've not done the math.

The point is this: If we can see these sorts of outcomes happening with UBI, then we can realistically estimate the costs and savings of the two systems. It'd take some work and research, sure, but I think it can be done.And for it to come out cheaper.

Agreed, though it may well be worth the trade off if we could eliminate huge layers of bureaucracy.. there are also a lot of ancillary programs and subsidies that this could be in place of. Reducing military expenditures would help a lot too.

I keep thinking as well that switching to a VAT/tariff/excise system that included money transfers would be beneficial... Even allow (re)patriation of funds without taxes, while funds leaving the country are taxed.

Suggested: Read Charles Murray's book on the topic. (yes, that Murray)

He pencils it out to something pretty close to 1:1, maybe something like 15% nominal spend increase, but with (theoretically) much greater utility for all concerned.