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Comment by brandon272 | Hacker News Reader

UBI seems to be presented under the context that every single adult in the country receives a UBI payment every month. Assuming that the UBI is funded through existing taxes/entitlement inlays, why not limit it to only those who need it or would ordinarily qualify for some kind of social assistance? (i.e. Unemployed/low income + retirees)

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UBI advocates believe that distinguishing between people who need/deserve assistance and people who don't need/deserve assistance is one reason why the US is not in favor of larger social outlays, and putting a check in everyone's hand every month will buy ironclad support from across the political spectrum. They additionally say that welfare programs can realize tremendous reductions in cost of administration by not having to distinguish between e.g. working and non-working recipients.

You are conflating two points here. UBI needs to be available to everyone, but that doesn't mean everyone should receive it. Unless you abolish all tax, then for people paying more than it in tax, it's simply a tax break.

How is it different from an earned income credit?

One of the advantages of truly universal -- everyone gets it, regardless of need -- payments is that you can do away with a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus whose only reason for existence is to try to determine who "really" needs help and who doesn't. It's also generally seen as a more palatable option for people who are offended that someone else might get something they don't, even if the other people truly do need it.

The theory is that if you phase out a given transfer payment at, say, $1000 per month, that reduces the incentive to earn more than $1000 per month. There's some evidence to suggest that's already the case with existing means tested transfer payments (such as unemployment coverage).

So instead of phasing out transfer payments at the low end, you reduce bureaucracy by introducing a universal payment, and balance it out at the high end with progressive taxes.

Someone who chooses to work and earns an additional $20,000 per year would still see a real benefit from their universal payment.

Someone who chooses to work and earns an additional $200,000 per year would be taxed such that their universal payment is essentially zero.

If one has to qualify for it, how is it different from welfare, etc.?

It could have a phase out, and many proposals indeed do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

But this can have the effect of reducing incentive to work, according to the criticisms section of that page and some other stuff I've read.

There's nothing wrong with reducing the incentive to work. That simply means jobs that must be done will have their wages rise. Jobs that don't need to be done will disappear.

Define "Jobs that don't need to be done". As Capitalism is ruthlessly profit-seeking, every job currently in place in free markets provides value to somebody. There are some in non-free markets, but that isn't affected by UBI existing.

What if the value to someone is keeping people busy and thus not challenging the status quo? Or what if the job is useless to society but still makes some money?

Those are still very poorly-defined (what is "keeping people busy"? what is "useless to society"? Examples, maybe?), so it's hard to say anything about them. That said, I don't see why reducing the labor supply would eliminate jobs like those before other jobs.

I'm just kinda reflecting what I read about a book called "bullshit jobs", where he gives examples like telemarketing and a lot of paper pushing admin positions. Basically anything that society as a whole wouldn't notice disappearing. I've heard criticisms like there's less bullshit jobs than he says there is, but still.

Well, telemarketing isn't useless. It is irritating, but it does provide real value to many companies in the form of customer acquisition (also, it takes a very small number of people to do a LOT of calls, so there probably aren't very many of these). "Paper pushing admin" isn't necessarily useless either - some things are just human-intensive to document or coordinate.

In either case, I don't see anything special about these jobs that would make them the first to disappear in the face of UBI.

A job that doesn't need to be done is one which doesn't produce enough value to pay a person enough to do it.

A possible example would be many cast food positions. If the workers didn't have to work together by wages would go up driving up the cost of fast-food. The higher cost would lower demand, and it might not make sense to have 10 fast food restaurants on every block.

I'm going to assume by "pay a person enough" you mean pay a living wage.

But now we're back to one of the key criticisms of UBI - reduced labor supply leads to higher wages but reduced employment, increased prices, reduced economic activity and consequently decreased consumer surplus (which would be a bad thing).

Wouldn't you then need some kind of bureaucracy to process applications, make decisions on eligibility and combat fraud? One of the arguments for UBI is allegedly lower overhead.

If it's not "universal", then it's just welfare.

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