The universality of UBI is key to its political viability. Just look at the number of people who are against forgiving college debt because they have already paid off college or are past the stage in their life in which they are personally concerned about college debt. Most people still view "fairness" as everyone being treated equally. So just give everyone an equal amount of money.
Equality of opportunity? Equality of outcome? Low penalty for failing? Low penalty for breaking the law? Eye for an eye?
Further it is not just people that have paid off college debt or are past the stage where are concerned about college debt..
Many people worked their ass off to become good at a trade or other profession with out incurring college debt, why should we then have to pay increased taxes to pay of those that bought into the college lie?
No one is offering me Mortgage Debt forgiveness? Housing is more of a necessity of life than a collage degree...
Sometimes fairness means leveling the playing field so everyone can compete equally.
We are not talking about a "family" but talking about government, that is something very different and it is very dangerous to view government as a "family" in the same way it dangerous to view a corporations or your employer as "family"
To treat people differently you would have to start basing income tax rates on characteristics of a person, such as race, sexual identity, age or height (like in your previous analogy)
Saying all income from 0-50000 is tax X, and income from 50000-100000 is taxed Y is not treating PEOPLE differently, all PEOPLE are treated the same in that situation.
To be clear I am a supporter of replacing all Welfare programs with a Negative Income Tax. I would also be in favor of a UBI that was not funded with Income taxation.
I also support the abolishment of all Income based taxation replacing it with Georgism Single Tax System
Characteristics like their marriage status, the number of children they have, the status of their home, their status as a student, or even the specific example you used of age which is tied to all sorts of taxation issues?
Although I'm not sure there is any point to continuing the conversation if you are going to nitpick any analogy and refuse to recognize that your views on taxation are an extreme minority opinion.
Meanness and unfairness are two different things.
Especially in a family setting, sometimes niceness can Trump fairness.
Everything else is just corruption
You're right that the parent was a good contribution and deserved to be unkilled. That's what vouching is for, and you made an excellent use of it.
Banning on HN isn't punitive, it's preventative. When a banned account has changed its ways and has reliably been sticking to HN's rules for a while now, we're happy to unban it. If people see cases like that, they should email [email protected] so we can look into it. That's a fine way to watch out for a fellow user.
When a banned account hasn't been reliably sticking to HN's rules for long enough, or hasn't posted enough to decide that yet, it stays banned for obvious reasons. In that case their good posts can still be unkilled, just on a comment-by-comment basis. That's why we created vouching and it works well.
> I am a huge fan of a negative income tax, but I prefer a UBI for multiple reasons. It lowers the administrative burden because you don’t need to figure out how much I made last year. It removes any strange shenanigans in terms of trying to report a low income. It alleviates a payments timing issue — you’re not likely to get your negative income tax when you might need it. And politically, I think it’s more appealing to be able to say to everyone: You have intrinsic value. This is how much you get for being an American, [a] human being.