The best way to do taxes' progressive support in reverse is to give everyone basic income, food stamps, and insurance and then offset that in the progressive tax rate.

Aside from removing stigma from using the universal minimums it solves the problem of losing 3X your income when combining separate state food program, city housing, and medical programs. That remains a problem even when individual programs move away from thresholds.

How do you suppose basic income can work in countries like India that don't have the resources that are available to a first world country?

Even 2 dollars a day of basic income would complete exhaust the government budget.

India does have something akin to basic income for rural households.

Fair, it's not just free money but it is a guarantee of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/observatory/mahatma-gandhi-nat...

The government is only able to provide a total of around 54 crore person days of employment through this scheme. That is less than half crore people in a country of 130 crore people availing this "guarantee" of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.nrega.nic.in/netnrega/mgnrega_new/Nrega_StateRep...

I think there's something like an inverse relationship between how many jobs are available and how much people need support. The US is actually among the top manufacturers still, but very little of it is still done by humans, so it doesn't create enough jobs. Even the jobs that remain for most people (retail/service) will eventually be automated away. There is plenty of money for UBI if the people who've benefited pay their fair share back into the systems that enabled those lopsided gains.

Some kind of support is needed in this case because none of the gains from all that efficiency are going to people who need money just to survive. It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

Please spend some time in a city in a third world country. I can't imagine a better way to cure for that level of inaccuracy of worldview.

I suggest Kolkata. The sight of frail old ladies barely covered by a single tattered sheet of cloth living on the footpath and begging for your alms has a way of communicating the reality of the world that nothing I can write could ever possibly match.

I can't possibly afford the trip, so I'll have to take your word for it.

The minimum wage in the USA is $7 an hour. In India, 10% of people live below $2 a day. In the state where I come from (population >100 million), that number is over 33%.

Even if you find yourself less fortunate compared to other people in your country, please have some empathy for the scale of problems in other, less developed countries.

You're reading too much into what I said. Nothing in it suggests a lack of empathy. I made no qualitative statements beyond the bit about rich people needing to pay back into the system that made their wealth possible. There is absolutely no judgement of any people in developing countries.

> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

Can you clarify what you meant by this? To me it seemed that you are implying that somehow the poor in third world countries are better off than the poor in first world countries because they still have their 2$ a day jobs.

Nope. Not saying anything of the sort. Your read is qualitative.

My comment was quantitative, strongly implied by the math. If I were going to make a qualitative statement, I would say life sucks for almost everyone on this godawful planet in different ways. You're trying to parse out a judgement of those relative conditions in me saying UBI might not be a universal solution to the hell-sphere theory of life on Earth. I don't know why.

Like I said, my objection was based on the way you had phrased that last sentence in your comment.

> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

The reason universal basic income does not work in India is not because people here still have their $3/day jobs. It doesn't work because there is simply not enough wealth here to restribute, so the problem here is still one of creation of wealth.

Maybe basic income only applies to "first world countries". Maybe there is a notion of plenty that only applies to modern industrial societies with high resource/population ratios. Maybe India just isnt ready?

Of course that is what I believe. Should have been clear from the way I phrased the question.

There was nothing in the context that suggested that this this discussion was only about the poor in developed countries. After all, most of the world's poor actually live (unsurprisingly) in poor to low-medium income countries. Perhaps this is something that I should be mindful of in the future?

As someone born in a "third world country" I am obviously very interested personally in these problems. In the state I was born in, one out of three people is still below the poverty line (which is like 2 USD a day). To me it seems that for us it is much more practical to learn from whatever the fuck China is doing rather than a method whose primary appeal is ideological.

People would prefer to choose how to allocate their income rather than forcing them to allocate a certain percentage to food via food stamps.

Also, in the same way that a universal basic income removes a layer of bureaucratic overhead, having universal healthcare also removes the burden of middlepeople handling insurance claims.

The problem with this approach in the real world is that multiple linear phase-outs of support from different programs might individually look "progressive" but in practice become poverty traps together e.g. if you're on one program because you have a disability and another because you've got small kids.

In an ideal world, somehow all the major programs are carefully co-designed to not do this, but given that they might come from different levels of government, have been designed at different times and have their phase-outs "legislated in" in ways that's hard to fix.

> That's an argument for "progressive" support, and against the threshold effect, not for basic income.

> There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.

UBI is a combination of two things:

(1) Gradual phase-out of support (I think this is your “progressive support”), and

(2) Recognizing that this isn’t just metaphorically “like taxes but in reverse” but it is largely identical (but for variations of definitions applied that do more to increase administrative costs than to advance any programmatic goal) functions performed by the tax bureaucracy, so that having multiple separate welfare bureaucracies assessing and measuring slightly different definitions of income and a few different add-on requirements for each program is mostly waste compared to having one common definition of income and one common benefit program for programs.

No, everything that's means tested ends up making being poor occasionally beneficial. Which you shouldn't ever do because that makes getting out of poverty harder.

They do work that way. Most states have a calculator that you can use to see what you are eligible for, based on income, family size, etc.

https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/SNAP_Estimate/frmEs...

How much money do we spend on career public servants to gatekeep poor people from the services they need?

idk why you're invoking "career public servants" here except as some kind of ideological shibboleth; much of the money spent here in Australia (YMMV, but I would imagine this is true in much of the world) goes to outsourced service providers to "gatekeep poor people from the services they need".

Because their jobs would almost always be handled better via automation. Their departments are hilariously understaffed, inefficient, and force people who have benefits to spend hours every week on the phone during daytime working hours.

A lot of places - I don't know where you are - pretty much intentionally understaff these sort of services and make them inconvenient, with the goal being to reduce the use of the services. "Inefficiency" is not always an accident here.

In Australia, we have a lot of outsourcing and automation ("robodebt" was a recent scandal, where automated overpayment clawbacks were sent out to thousands of people, sometimes incorrectly). This hasn't improved matters.

The problem is not particularly connected to "public servants" - it's clearly possible to screw up this kind of thing whether private/public or in-person/automated. It's a matter of policy and attitude, not the delivery method.

If you build a system with the intent to humiliate and deter its users, it will waste everyone's time regardless of who provides it and how.

You're missing the point. These public servants work public servant hours, aka, a very small subset of the total day during which a lot of people who are on public assistance are either working or are being pressured into finding work. They literally are not available when a lot of people on public assistance are free to communicate with them. The companies that limit their customer service hours to normal working hours are usually either small or financial institutions. Everyone else handles customers whenever customers have issues.