Yes the article is badly misinformed and not really worth consideration.

That said there are much stronger arguments against UBI. There's a strong argument that UBI combined with current housing and spending policies... would simply end up in the hands of landlords. The article doesn't even mention "rent" but have no doubt landlords and banks are always waiting in the wings to capture virtually any surplus income. In practice UBI would have to be accompanied by government housing... and down that path lies ruin.

(Note the price of food and other necessities would likely not be inflated under UBI. Suppliers in these markets would -- unless they illegally collude -- end up trying to undercut one another to gain market share. In fact there's reason to believe UBI done right would drive down prices as the market as a whole becomes more dynamic. More money, more consumers, more competition, etc. But housing suppliers know that the banks are always ready to provide mortgages no matter how much they raise prices.)

A Job Guarantee [1] would be much more effective than UBI in virtually every way. Most importantly landlords couldn't consistently capture the additional income. There's, really, no reason to simply give the money away when there's plenty of work to be done.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/6/16036942/jo...

I find the rent argument unconvincing. Free people from having to live near high concentration of jobs, and the competition for housing just explodes.

I don't like the current debt-based economy where almost infinite amounts of debt can be created in the first place.

Also, UBI is supposed to replace other entitlements, so the cost before tax increases will not be $3 trillion, it will be ($3 trillion - all current entitlements' cost)

Well, replacing all of them is probably not realistic, not everyone's problems can be solved with a small steady amount of money after all.

Consumer spending would also increase, thereby increasing tax revenue, raising money for said payments.

Edit for the down voters: See velocity of money and savings rates of the poor.

How would it work in terms of replacing Medicare and covering high-ticket medical procedures?

> How would it work in terms of replacing Medicare and covering high-ticket medical procedures?

Medicare is an insurance system. In principle if you gave the average person the equivalent amount of money it should be enough to buy health insurance with.

If that isn't true in practice it's a failure of healthcare/insurance laws rather than the UBI.

> In principle if you gave the average person the equivalent amount of money it should be enough to buy health insurance with.

So the working scenario is UBI followed by health insurance mandate? What happens if the remainder is $0, or worse, healthcare prices (and consequently health insurance prices) outpace UBI growth?

> So the working scenario is UBI followed by health insurance mandate?

Don't we already have a health insurance mandate?

> What happens if the remainder is $0, or worse, healthcare prices (and consequently health insurance prices) outpace UBI growth?

Presumably the same thing that happens if healthcare prices outpace the Medicare budget.

>Don't we already have a health insurance mandate?

Not anymore, Congress voted to remove it

It wouldn't.

Health care is a good litmus test for UBI in the US. There's reasonably broad support for access/universal coverage but no will to pay for it (people in office are probably more opposed to it than voters).

If you approach it from the Negative Income Tax implementation then it's also much less to fund because basically the tax deductions already baked into the tax code can be made at some level into something that's sourced via UBI instead of just a floating deduction. Of the remainder, you fund much of that from some subset of existing social safety net programs.

It's not trivial, but I'd agree that the line was at best sloppy accounting, and at worst a dishonest criticism.

I'm not sure what part of the statement you're arguing against, but there are, according to the Census, about 250M adult Americans[1] (take the 323M total pop figure, multiply by 1 minus the percent under 18 to get total pop above 18 years of age); if you give 250M people 10k/year, that's $2.5T/year, or "about $3 trillion". Now, I'm presuming we're only giving UBI to adults, but the article says "every America", in which case it would be 323M people times $10k, or $3.2T.

For "doubling the personal income tax", I originally interpreted that to mean that, to raise the $3T, we would need to double the personal income tax revenues. The federal government appears to pull in ~3$T/year in revenue, from various sources. If we presume the burden of paying for UBI to be spread proportionally among the current sources of revenue, this would indeed imply doubling the personal income tax. (That $3T would need to become $6T; if we proportionally increase each revenue source, the amount of revenue collected in the form of personal taxes must thus double. This is honestly quite an assumption; if anything, I would worry that personal income taxes would need to pull in more than its proportion, as I presume some revenue sources will be fixed, or undesirable to increase, such as borrowing.)

Your example can literally hold true, even with all of the above, AFAICT. Yes, we may charge a hypothetical person $12k, and give him back $10k, for a net of $2k. But there will also be others, presumably poorer, that are paying much less in taxes than they're getting in UBI, and that must come from somewhere…

[1]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045216

> For "doubling the personal income tax", I originally interpreted that to mean that, to raise the $3T, we would need to double the personal income tax revenues.

The issue is the premise.

In theory you can have a basic income with a phase out, which pursuant to this dubious accounting would be much less expensive. But in practice it's exactly the same thing.

The reason phase outs are a bad idea -- and this is an issue with a great deal of the existing assistance programs -- is that benefits phase outs and taxes are equivalent, so they should be evaluated together to avoid silly results.

Suppose you have a system for housing vouchers (or any other assistance program) where you get $5000/year at $0 in income with a 20% phase out rate as income increases. Meanwhile there is an income tax with a 15% rate from $0-$50000 and 25% thereafter. Then what you really have is a 35% rate from $0-$25000, followed by a 15% rate from $25000-$50000, followed by a 25% rate above $50000. Which makes no sense, isn't what was intended, and shouldn't have happened. And it only gets worse and harder to reason about as you add multiple programs which each have their own phase out conditions.

The way to resolve this is to eliminate the phase outs entirely and have the government recover the money through normal taxes, e.g. by setting a single uniform rate. That nominally makes the tax rate higher for some people, but in practice it's the same thing and makes it a lot easier to avoid accidentally creating a ridiculous tax rate schedule.

> Your example can literally hold true, even with all of the above, AFAICT. Yes, we may charge a hypothetical person $12k, and give him back $10k, for a net of $2k. But there will also be others, presumably poorer, that are paying much less in taxes than they're getting in UBI, and that must come from somewhere...

Of course, and it would come from taxpayers with above average incomes. That's the entire point of the system.

But even someone who comes out ahead, because they e.g. receive $10,000 and only pay $6000 in taxes, is still giving back $6000. Only the remaining $4000 has to be covered by someone else, not the entire amount. Accounting for this drastically reduces the net amount other taxpayers actually have to cover -- half the recipients would be covering their own UBI entirely and even the other half will on average cover 50% of it, making the actual cost only a quarter of the amount quoted. Which is in line with the cost of the existing assistance programs it would be replacing.

UBI has to always be talked about with the way you are going to fund it via tax.

This article says higher income would be better off. But no, they would be worse off as over some magical amount you'd be paying out more than you'd get via the UBI.

However paying for UBI can also be done via a wealth tax. This would be ( theoretically ) the nicest way to evenly tax the wealth distribution of a nation then smooth it over the the entire population until you pull everyone up over a certain poverty line.

But a wealth tax would not be popular, and could be hard to implement effectively.

Especially if it replaces certain existing social programs. Realistically the dishonesty is to be expected from the people and institutions writing these pieces.

With monetary policy and quantitative easing we simply create money on nearly the same order of magnitude. Unfortunately this money flows primarily to investment banks and other large institutions, not to individuals.

I am much more interested in UBI as a substitute for both welfare and monetary policy, than for welfare alone. The gross anatomy of most western economies would be radically changed though, rendering most scale comparisons moot and also making it difficult to imagine how to get there from here - incumbent beneficiaries would fight it tooth and nail.

> if you give an upper middle-class American $10000 and you raise their tax bill by $12000

Can you show your math? Curious what tax rates are assumed.

You can only do it this way if realistically, only the bottom 25% came out net positive from UBI.

I'm not using real numbers or assuming any tax rates. All I'm saying is that if you both pay someone and also raise their taxes, only the difference is a real amount being taxed/given.