I'm very interested in this. My own intuition says basic income won't work, but it'd sure be nice if it did.
Also, most income earned by the top 1% of income earners is employment income; many professionals (doctors / dentists / engineers / lawyers / accountants) fall into that top 1% of incomes. The working-age individuals whose income is primarily from capital are generally in the top 0.1%.
I am not American and I don't know if doctors and lawyers are usually considered 1 percenters, but Wikipedia says "Data on the minimum yearly income to be considered among the 1% vary per source, ranging from about $500,000 to $1.3 million."[1] It is my understanding that half a million dollar is not a common engineer or doctor income, I am not sure most income earned by 1 percenters is employment income.
> In 2015, according to PSZ, the richest 1% of people in America received 20.2% of all the income in the nation. Ten points of that 20.2% came from equity income, net interest, housing rents, and the capital component of mixed income. Which is to say, 10% of all national income is paid out to the 1% as capital income.
> Even if you exclude the capital component of mixed income (since it is connected to work even if the income is not from labor) and housing rents (since these are imputed to homeowners rather than paid to them as cash), that still means that, from equity income and interest alone, the top 1% receives 7.5% of the national income without having to work for it. Put another way: the average person in the top 1% receives a UBI equal to 7.5 times the average income in the country.
That last line is key. Even if most of the income of the 1% is not passive, they still receive a massive amount of passive income.
Source: https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/the-ubi-already-exists-for-t...
Sorry. My mistake
IMHO, Finland hope that with basic income they will spend less on prisons or social workers in long term.
IMHO, main risk for basic income is exponential growth of money eaters in long run (>50 years).