For so many reasons. Chief among them, maybe, people are generally reluctant to support governments engaged in transfers of resources from themselves to billionaires.
> I'm not sure whether anyone would complain
Maybe the billionaires would complain? Or is their sacrifice necessary for your greater good?
I would also complain. It's unethical. And, we don't need yet another tax on the most value-bearing (and typically philanthropic) people in society, to be collected by the most violent organization in history, to dole out food stamps and other benefits in the most inefficient way possible.
If we assume for a moment that this is true, then why would this state of affairs be okay? Society cannot run on the philanthopy of billionaires.
Further, there's not very much evidence that this is actually true. In terms of largest individual contributions, yes, many billionaires make impressive donations and pay for valuable things, but that's the all-too-common fallacy of looking at absolute figures when it's relative figures that matter.
Ignoring that a lot of charity and philantropic work wouldn't even be _necessary_ in a world with less extreme wealth inequality, the idea that non-billionaires aren't proportionally charitable doesn't really hold much water.
Well, it doesn't run on taxes either. Successful societies runs on voluntary exchange.
Given how much of the taxes are paid by the ultra wealthy (most of them), how philanthropic they are (very), and how wasteful the government is (impressively), why would you assume that voluntary philanthropy cannot replace involuntary, state-managed welfare?
Everybody just submitting to the hope that billionaires will take pity on them might even work with a sufficiently benevolent overlord, but you get the same problem as so many alternatives to democracy have: If you concentrate all the power in one person, or a small set of people, it's a breeding ground for corruption. Even if your set of people is entirely benevolent, over time as that set of people change it becomes near certain eventually you'll get people who aren't benevolent, and then everyone is fucked.
Democracy, and taxation-based systems of governmental funding, are less efficient than the best possible case elsewhere, but are primarily valuable for massively reducing the risk and dangers of bad actors. Concentrating power among an elite class has historically always been a fantastic way of increasing the risk and dangers of bad actors instead.
Presuming you're talking about value-bearing in terms of job creation, this statement is tautological. In a society where a handful of people own the vast majority of the wealth, of course they're also the most value-bearing and philanthropic: they're the only ones who can be!
Then it becomes two questions: is the cost of enforcing the thresholds greater than the cost of just giving it to everyone, and can the public be made to understand this rational tradeoff.
I agree you can get some efficiency gains from eliminating thresholds.
Back of the napkin, though, you're talking about an implementation cost delta (ie, only threshold determination costs) that swamps the benefit-and all other implementation costs-by several multiples, maybe an order of magnitude, depending on the size of the targeted group.
But ok... Although it's not my intuition that threshold costs would significantly outstrip the savings from targeting, it's just a factual question. For the sake of argument, say that happens in a case.
Then yeah, that's a great candidate for universality.
If those are the cases you want to focus on... Are we then agreeing that universality is preferable only in those cases where it pays for itself?
Because that is totally consistent with my position. If you only want universality when it's cheaper then we already agree and can just defer to the CBO.
No, I am not trying to argue it will be cheaper. It will likely be more expensive and/or worse for everyone involved but I think it will bring us all together. I think it is worth the extra cost or degraded service.