"Andrew proposes funding UBI by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 10%. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.

A Value-Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value-Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent."

Source: https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-ubi/

I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.

It has to include pensioners. To make it work you need to take the cost of the bureaucracy out of the system, which means UBI supersedes all other welfare. There will be no pensions, no unemployment, no child benefits (children also get UBI, paid to their parents until they come of age), no means testing - everyone gets UBI, full stop. That's what the U is for!

Interestingly until recently Children in the UK got UBI in the form of family allowance (paid to the parents). x for first born, y for subsequent or something. The sweeping government cuts lead to it becoming means-tested and complicated.

One Conservative (sorry cannot find the quote) remarked that they spent theirs on Champangne, which caused horror in the press, but is money flowing into the economy at least...unlike tax benefits to land-owners

But since you want to keep social security, medicaid and medicare you need to keep a budget that somehow has 2 trillion dollars for BUI and 2 trillion for pensioners and children.

Not much of an improvement really.

Which is my main issue with everyone who proposes UBI. Once they are shown the number you get by multiplying population by income they slowly start to reinvent the welfare state that somehow is so terrible it needs to be replaced with UBI.

As someone once said: Crypto-currencies are gods way of teaching libertarians why regulations exist in the financial sector. I would like to rephrase that: UBI is gods way of teaching libertarians why the welfare state was created.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

Also I don’t know which version of libertarian you’re using, but I don’t think I’d classify libertarians as being super supportive of UBI...

If you get $10k guaranteed, then somebody earning $20k exactly thus has an effective income tax rate of 0%, neither recieving nor paying income tax to the government. Anything earned over that starts to be taxed as standard currently.

You'd need to fiddle with the specific numbers, the rates, et cetera, but most serious suggestions are not as trivial as "let's give everyone ten thousand dollars". The principle behind UBI is not that everyone should recieve the same chunk of money from the government, but to provide an income floor that cannot be gone under that should be sufficient to keep people healthy and able to manage. It's a "Universal Basic Income" in the sense that the basic income is universally set, and nobody can go beneath it - you absolutely can go _above_ it.

Relating it to the welfare state is a good comparison, I think. In the same way that socialised healthcare ensures that everyone's bare minimum healthcare is at least up to a good standard, UBI could ensure that everyone's bare minimum income is livable. That doesn't mean that somebody earning $150k/yr still needs that 10k of government assistance, because they are not in need of that income protection (at that moment - of course it immediately returns should they _stop_ earning that much).

I think we have to be clear though, we are expecting to have to increase taxation to pay for UBI. If the need for UBI is driven by automation removing jobs, then the extra wealth that the automation creates is going to have to be re-distributed. It is also time to revisit the special treatment that capital (especially land) gets in the tax system. Land Value Tax is perhaps a much more socially aware approach.

I am not necessarily in agreement with everything UBI related, but adding noise to the conversation isn't going to get us to any insights any quicker.