> The universality of UBI seems to be a carrot to sell the policy based upon the (flawed, as demonstrated in the article) assumption that universal benefits are politically safer.

It is not.

It is, instead, that separately means-testing individual programs is at best wasteful duplicative bureaucracy, and often has really dumb effects even in the cases where the individual programs in isolation don’t have cliffs or other perverse incentives when the means-testing of separate programs is considered together (such as totally to > $1 in lost benefits for each $1 in additional income.)

Progressive taxation is, inherently, universal means-testing which, because its all in one spot, can more easily avoid either slipping a bad incentive through in an underobserved program or creating a non-obvious bad incentive in the aggregate of programs.

That’s why the U is in UBI.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but it seems like if you have the resources and political power to institute a universal program, you could even more easily just fix means-testing.

Also, not all "means-testing" is made alike. They are not all equally bureaucratic. You could easily do a negative income tax that is basically automatic.

> Also, not all "means-testing" is made alike. They are not all equally bureaucratic. You could easily do a negative income tax that is basically automatic.

“Negative income tax” is literally just another (older, in fact) name for UBI.

They're similar but not the same.

In UBI everyone gets the same amount of money. NIT would work basically like how paycheck withholdings work for income tax, just that they can go negative and the government can pay you based on income and exemptions. The only trick is that you would need the equivalent of a W-2 for anyone in America eligible for the program.

NIT is equivalent to the combination of UBI + progressive (usually) or flat (in some NIT schemes) income tax. Since no one proposing UBI in places with a basically progressive income tax proposes abolishing the income tax or making it something other tjhan progressive or flat, NIT is identical to actual real-world UBI proposals.

I suppose in some cartoonish parody of MMT dreamed up by conservatives to scare children you could a UBI with no tax system that wasn’t functionally identical to a NIT, but that’s not what anyone is proposing.

> The only trick is that you would need the equivalent of a W-2 for anyone in America eligible for the program.

You need W-2s for the same set of people you need them for already (those with the kind of income reported on a W-2.)

Okay, I get what you are saying. The distinction I was trying to make was that a program that gives people cash every month and then asks some of them to pay it back to the government at the end of the year would be devastating to most consumers (this is how some UBIs have been framed).

But I think we are on the same page. If you file a W-2, you are probably going to withhold income. At which point they are functionally the same.