As for your other point, I guess the issue the lack of a hypothesis regarding basic income. You can't test "basic income" as such, and with such unspecific setup you are sure to conflate rather than illuminate mechanisms of relevance. In any case, it depends on your question whether you need to take income away from anyone. Are you going to start by examining distributive effects? Really? No physisict would test their airflow experiment on a flying rocket, while also trying to measure how he exhaust affects the wind in Costa Rica next week and saying 'something' about the future climate. They would start by putting their airflow gizmo into an isolated chamber - which is, afaik, more or less where UBI experiments are.
Fair point. I guess you could run an experiment where money is simply taken away from people, destroyed and then look at the effect of that in isolation.
That it is harder to draw conclusions from experiments in biology than in physics doesn’t imply biology isn’t a science. Economics adds the problem that we (rightfully) don’t want to do realistic controlled experiments (would at times be hard, too. Put a few million people in a country with a given law regime, watch for a couple of decades, draw conclusions. Repeat) but again, to me, that doesn’t imply it isn’t a science.
I think it’s more part of the humanities than a science, though.
Money would majorly come from those who have the greater means to pay larger amounts into the system, and on the hypothesis that bettering the material conditions of those in the lower and middle class will necessarily lead to increasing productivity and thus (and 'thus' is a large leap) greater general income that can partly be paid back into the system in a cycle.
How much you plan to pay in taxes to support my UBI?
I expect to pay and continue paying a lot, yet the benefit is more than what I pay in taxes. What's better is that our current UBI is quite a bit above zero already, but the distribution is fraught with large costs in time. Re-organizing and streamlining UBI distribution would result in significant cost improvements to the current US welfare approach, and improve its impact.
Can you back your claim with facts? UBI is universal, not magic.
> I expect to pay and continue paying a lot,
Just say a number, so we will put it into formula to see is your expected taxation will match minimum requirement for UBI.
Typical wealth distribution without UBI:
^
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| *
| * *
| * *
| * *
| * *
|* * * *
+------------------------------------------------>
^ - number of people, > - income
^ *
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| *
| *
| *
| *
| * * *
+--U------------------------------------------->
^ - number of people, > - income, U - UBI level
As you see, UBI erases middle class. Everyone becomes poor, except some rich.
The US already has a non-zero UBI[1], it's simply inefficiently distributed via the negative income tax rate and various welfare efforts. That's a clear first area to fix things up. Then, if we need to increase the historically low tax rates on high income households or implement capital tax rates on the wealth, increases in taxes can be considered.
Further, from a theoretical perspective, the economy is not zero-sum. A rising tide lifts all boats; if less money has to be doled out to industries supporting enforced poverty, such as private jail systems among others, then there is more money in the economy for utilization for many things (including but not limited to UBI). General equilibrium effects often have counterintuitive effects, such as they are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_in_the_...
I answered your earlier questions already. I encourage you to read full threads.
So you're saying that you're a poor economist, then.
A reasonable overview: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/unboxing-universal-basic-inc...