This is pretty much Chicago in a nutshell. You have all these handouts to public sector unions in return for union votes and union support. You have further entitlements given to the poor on the south and west sides for votes. You have all these ugly deals done in exchange for staying in power, and no one cares about actually balancing the books. When push comes to shove, you just raise taxes over and over. In other words it won't just go "higher and higher" it'll just be higher for special interest groups who can deliver votes. If you can't deliver mass votes and aren't part of one of these groups, your income will be low or non-existant as you'll be stuck in the 'worker' group and not in the 'leisure' group.
GMI needs an implementation that works. I suspect there really is none that doesn't quickly just become corrupt patronage. GMI and democracy/elections may not be compatible. It may only work under a totalitarian system and sounds pretty close to the USSR's system at that point. The best case scenario here seems to be automation making the cost of living so low that existing welfare systems will just be more than enough to take care of people. If we can vastly lower the cost of everything, then modest payouts will be enough and we'll be able to retain a capitalist and democratic system.
Practically I suspect it will need to be quite low to avoid all sorts of distortions.
The existing programs are very distorting already, often giving poor people 100%+ marginal taxes.
Sure, Basic Income would be distorting, but far less than that. It should also save a lot of money since it requires almost no people to administer.
This is also the biggest problem with instituting it, since the people holding those jobs will fight to the death to keep them.
There will be a lot of people who will use the freedom granted by basic income for productive means but there will also be a lot of people who won't do anything productive and just live off their basic income.
That will give opponents a lot of material for campaigning against basic income. So my prediction is that this won't work long term. That is, unless our society changes in radical ways.
Won't do anything productive like spend money on food, housing, and entertainment? They will just sit inside and stare at the walls all day.
Have you had to file for Unemployment "Insurance" yet, in your lifetime? It's a complicated circus to get back money that you "paid in". You have to prove, and then re-prove, your past earnings and tax amounts that had paid into the programs (plural if working across state boundaries); you have to "be actively seeking work" and prove, every single week, that fact with somewhat embarrassing forms to fill out to get the money that you already set aside for this already embarrassing situation...
These systems treat you as "guilty-by-default" and we've let the worry of possible fraud, however unlikely, turn these systems into giant theaters of "fraud reduction" and complicated terror on the individuals dealing with the system.
Basic Income, by expecting to be unqualified and guaranteed to all regardless of need or effort, is intentionally about simplicity and about avoiding the giant red tape spaghetti that is our current "entitlement" systems. If everyone gets it, equally, then you don't need to worry about "fraud" and you don't need to worry about "proof".
Base it on simple things, age, legal status, and positive community involvement. We still need to make people feel useful rather than resentful and entitled. It's an entitlement but some minimum effort should be shown that one is at least trying to contribute to their society.
What we have is the compromise. The point of (Universal) Basic Income is that the compromise isn't good enough and we can do better, by going simpler, removing the human moral judgments and encompassing everybody equally.
This is definitely a case where compromise destroys the integrity of the concept. It should be "sellable" enough on its own merits to avoid breaking it.
«We still need to make people feel useful rather than resentful and entitled.»
There are so many assumptions here to unpack. People will feel resentful to get "free" money from their government? People "need" to feel useful? Plus there is obvious so much hate overloaded in people's usage of the words "entitled" and "entitlement" that there's probably a half-dozen PhD theses we could point to.
Do you have moral complaints about Basic Income? Basic Income isn't about policing what people do with it. That's part of the simplicity that makes Basic Income more interesting than the compromises and the other alternatives. Does it concern you what other people would do with their money if they had just a little bit more? Basic Income intentionally doesn't make judgments, that's a part of its beauty. It's a sort of freedom: here's money, do what you will with it.
Yes, there are probably simple things that would still make sense to do, but mostly it should just be "Are you a US Citizen? Do you pay US income taxes?" Curtailing it further than that starts to conflate money and morality in weird ways.
Any time you here someone say "basic income", they mean a guaranteed, zero qualifications beyond citizenship and possibly adulthood, income. It is meant as a replacement for many aspects of the welfare system.
It is true, since humans are bad at making many financial/health/welfare decisions, that not all public welfare costs are a good fit for replacement with a BI. But things like food stamps, disability income and section 8 housing all do appear to be good fits.
It is a football like you say but no one has dramatically increased it for decades.
Besides the looming shortfall it seems to be run fairly responsibly.
Where would this basic income for everyone magically come from? It maybe would be possible if the rich (millionaires and especially billionaires) and corporations would pay for it with higher taxes, but since they run the world, I'm guessing that's not gonna happen.
Seriously, the current welfare systems are quite ok (pay only those who don't have enough and/or don't have a job), just streamline it and tax the rich a bit more for more money to go into it. Europe seems to do it best so far. But of course that's socialism, etc. (and somehow basic income isn't)...