Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work

Re:Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work by bryanlarsen on Monday January 17, 2022 @02:15PM (#29970530)

That's a great example, but you need to use smaller numbers. If UBI is put into place, the only thing somebody making $4K/mo after taxes is going to do is complain about his increased taxes.

In a balanced UBI, the UBI is paid for with taxes. So if you make the average income, you get $X from UBI and your taxes go up by $X. If you make more than average, like your example, then you pay out more than you receive in UBI.

Because average income is considerably higher than median income, most people benefit from UBI.

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Re:Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work by feoren on Monday January 17, 2022 @02:58PM (#29971051)

There are other taxes than income taxes. My idealistic view of UBI is a way to share the increasing benefit of automation. So if a factory owner fires all his employees and replaces them with robots, his increased profits are rather heavily taxed and go to UBI. I am aware of how logistically difficult it would be to have a fair "automation tax" though. But the point is: income tax is not the only tax, and probably not even the best tax, to fund UBI.

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Re:Basic income would not reduce people’s willingness to work by bryanlarsen on Tuesday January 18, 2022 @07:59AM (#29978334)

There are no other taxes capable of pulling in trillions of dollars annually. So it'll have to be at least partially on income tax.

(I hate saying trillions of taxes when talking about UBI. Since most of the effect of the increased taxes is just a clawback, on net the tax is only in the hundreds of billions).

Morally, there's also a good case for taxing income for UBI -- it's a fair claw back for those that don't need UBI.

But there's a solid base to your argument -- we definitely should be increasing other taxes and decreasing income taxes in general.

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