In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.
Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place. So this statement you made is false:
> This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.
> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.
This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.
No; it may obscure that distinction slightly but it very much still exists. Anyone who receives more in UBI and other desired services than they pay in taxes will remain a "leach". Those who pay more in taxes than they receive are the providers, without whom the whole UBI system could not exist. (The relevant pre-UBI terms are "net tax payer" and "net tax receiver".)
No that's not true at all. So what if you're not the only one benefitting from your UBI payments; they're still coming from someone else's effort, not your own. To be a "giver" you first must earn the things you're giving away. Your attitude is unhealthy and shows how selfish and narcissistic you are.
Because then you need to test for means, and that means you have to hire new bureaucracy to conduct those tests, and then pay their benefits and pensions and travel expenses, and then you need to hire additional bureaucracy to address occasional loopholes in your checks, and then 10-20-50-100 years later you're back to square one with massively bloated self-serving bureaucracies conveniently appropriating dollars to save pennies.
That's what drives UBI advocates bonkers about the current benefit programs. For example, food stamps benefits. I say anyone with an SSN should be able to apply for one and get it electronically. It helps farmers, helps food availability, and is generally spent locally. Instead we have layers and layers of bureaucracy ensuring Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are prevented from receiving SNAP benefits.