> 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.