It's true that most people do manage to consume a basket of goods costing at least as much as reasonable basic income levels. Even the homeless end up consuming many tens of thousands of dollars every year, in costs of health care and social services. (More, in fact, than the simply impoverished do.)

But that suggests a key point: the basket of goods and time that people consume while below the poverty line is not necessarily what they would choose to consume if they simply received some amount of money equivalent to what one could reasonably expect to survive on. For instance, a huge chunk of the money we ostensibly give to people goes to Medicaid, which effectively redirects aid to an expensive program that doesn't even seem to improve health outcomes. What the money would flow into instead would cause inflation in those goods, but at the same time capital would flow to the production and provision of those same goods as more people were buying more of them. The net result is increased consumption of the replacement goods coupled with an increase in price somewhere between 0% and the percentage increase of the demand going for them. The exact value depends on elasticities and how many new ways capital can find to supply those goods.

There are welfare programs that do pass out real money, but they force a different kind of consumption: of time. Instead of consuming hours as an individual knows best, we ask them to send out dozens of ineffective applications. I don't know if they even have good choices: maybe these people are just screwed. But I do know that they probably know a lot better about how to get out of their situation--within the constraints of their particular levels of knowledge and self-control--than I do.

There are also psychological aspects that are pretty important. Living in a constant state of staving off being kicked onto the street forces a focus on short-term thinking, at the expense of medium- and long-term thinking. This is more behavioral than micro economics, but it's as real a factor as any other, and definitely changes what and how people choose to consume.

It's worth noting that I've left off all discussion of people above the basic income level (which, to be clear, I'm imagining as being around $10k), who constitute a significant majority of Americans. Two points I'd like to mention:

1) A lot of people fall into a benefits trap, where if they work they'll be punished. Literally they face a greater than 100% tax rate. For people on disability, this can actually be from 1,000% to 10,000%. This is horrific from an economic point of view, and horrific from the perspective of human dignity and autonomy. A basic income is one way of totally removing those obstacles to participating in the labor force.

2) People at $40k and above theoretically shouldn't be affected much by my suggested basic income, aside from a real but manageable tax hike. In practice, though, I suspect the behavioral aspect would be significant, if they know that they can quit their jobs without having to worry about bare minimum needs (though this is clearly just a strong suspicion on my part--I have difficulty imagining a good test for it). Instead of worrying about destroying their savings, they can go out and try new, risky ideas. I think we live in an era where there's a great need for individual entrepreneurship in both monetizable and non-monetizable goods, so that's something I embrace.

Now there's an interesting argument! If I understand you correctly, your argument is that BI would effectively improve our net economic efficiency (in addition to individual quality-of-life for the poorest) by eliminating waste (in time, money, red tape, etc) from the slew of bureaucratic programs we currently have? That's an extremely interesting point, and one I hadn't considered. BI as a dollar-for-dollar alternative to current entitlement programs sounds very attractive.

I hadn't considered the >100% tax rate on the impoverished, either. I wasn't even aware that this happens - it sounds absolutely horrific, and should be abolished posthaste if it's anything like you describe. Can you point me at some reading material on that sort of thing?

As for the $40k-and-above folks, I definitely think that it could encourage exploration by people with little to lose, but I don't think it would significantly affect people with mortgages and families - quitting your job to pursue a dream that fails still means losing your house and not being able to consistently feed your kids even on $10k BI. I definitely think it would help a certain set of people, and I would love to see entrepreneurship encouraged and facilitated; my concern is that it would do so by disproportionately penalizing existing entrepreneurs, by front-loading the majority of the cost for such a system onto them, and making them bear the brunt of the penalty for it if it fails.

> I hadn't considered the >100% tax rate on the impoverished, either. I wasn't even aware that this happens - it sounds absolutely horrific, and should be abolished posthaste if it's anything like you describe.

It's a > 100% marginal tax rate. Emphasis on "marginal".

It happens every time the government decides to give something to the poor. A person that just crosses over the criteria used to determine who is poor has a >100% tax rate over that extra income. That means, if they work more they lose money - something called "poverty trap" because it effectively entraps people into poverty.

The solution to avoiding it is to simply give the money for everybody, and create a progressive tax that gets it back from the richer people. Or, in other words, basic income.

I've never understood why they don't simply structure those things to supply benefit reduced by the amount you make over the benefits maximum until the benefit no longer applies.

A person who receives $100 worth of benefit so long as they make make under $200 faces a harsh cut from $299 to only $200 should their income surpass it. Simply culling overage from the benefit, on the other hand, would mean they would reach a plateau in which they are adjusted to $300 from $200 to $300 worth of raised personal income, which while not be greatly encouraging, would have none of the damning nature of the strict cutoff approach.

It's stupid, but that's because it's very difficult to write out benefits that intelligently phase out. The reason is simple math.

Suppose you have a $5k/year benefit at $0 that phases out to $0k/year at $20k. The worst way to do that is obviously to have a cliff: at $20k, you suddenly get $5k/year less, effectively an infinite marginal rate. It's as extreme a trap as you can imagine.

But now consider the opposite, best case scenario that's the softest landing spread out over that entire income range: a benefit that phases out linearly. So at $10k/year, you get a total of $12.5k; at $15k/year, you get a total of $16.25k/year. That means you automatically get a walloping marginal tax rate.

If you wanted to limit benefit phase outs to contribute a maximum of 5% in marginal tax rates, you've got to spread it out over 20x the value of the benefit. A $5k benefit has to phase out over $100k.

Also note that that's by itself: you've also got regular taxes to pay. Worse, few of these welfare benefits have been designed so intelligently, and there are a lot of them, so you constantly hit discontinuities in marginal tax rates that make it really irrational to do any additional work or try to improve yourself.

That still leaves a 100% marginal "tax" rate. It's better than >100%, but still seems less than ideal. Trying to fix that quickly gets you into Basic Income territory.

The importance is that it turns a local maxima into a plateau and replaces a disincentive to improve your lot beyond the assistance with a mere lack of incentive as you improve beyond it. It provides assistance without a hook to keep you on it.

As to the point about Soviet economy,Marx didn't actually have any real plan for how socialism should work, aside from a couple pamphlets he wrote that lacked any real detail. I guess the plan was to play it by ear once the almighty revolution happened. From a business perspective, it strikes me as something close to "Let's implement a product with literally tens of millions of features in a single sprint, and if we fail millions of people will starve to death!" [1]

A good accessible book to read, if you're interested in Soviet economic planning, is Red Plenty. Yes, it's fiction, but very much targeted at people who think linear programming and algorithmic complexity aren't out of place in a fiction book.

[1] That's a bit unfair, in a perverse way, as most of the mass famines we hear about with tens of millions of deaths weren't an accidental byproduct of bad planning but a conscious decision to destroy political enemies or demographics that statistically were less likely to support the regime. From an implementation point of view, the mass economic dislocations the USSR experienced in the revolutionary period were less than I might expect.