UBI and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness
musingmind.org
musingmind.org
You can't fund a full (poverty level) UBI without progressive taxation (as you mention, most people don't recommend paying for UBI via deficit spending), and UBI advocates acknowledge that there will be a breakeven point beyond which people's taxes increase more than the UBI affords. This achieves the same "curving towards zero" of the benefits as if you had means tested people and only given people below a certain income some payment.
UBI advocates tend to prefer doing it this way - giving everyone the same amount, and taxing it back from high-earners to achieve the same "phase out" effect" - so as to avoid the bureaucracy of means-testing.
What you're saying here is pretty close to the "modernized negative income tax" I suggest towards the end of the essay. Whether UBI, or stimulus-style phaseout, there will always be net recipients, and net funders. I'm not sure whether means testing is better than going universal and taxing on the back end to achieve particular distributions, but it's important to note that UBI's funded by progressive taxation, when all is said and done, are still redistributing money from above to below.
A hyperbolic example: One might be able to send fuel to Mars and reconsume some on a return voyage (taxes) but it costs fuel to get there and fuel to get back. There is no such thing as 100% efficient salvation of discretized token, so we have to distribute it intelligently to begin with.
The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts that are partially taxed back?
In theory, I don't see any obvious reason means-testing is less inefficient that universalizing.
(My personal hang-up is on the gross cost required for UBI relative to an NIT. Even with the same net effects, UBI's political feasibility is far less than NIT's given the disparity in tax revenues required)
Well said! It'd be great to get something like this on the books. In general, however, taxation is politically unsavory and, primarily, taxes have varying surface areas based on states' laws, so any attempt at trying to coordinate the appropriate amount of taxation would be indirect at best.
In my view, the universal-payout-and-taxback is a tarpit with no harmonious resolve, and giving money to everyone devalues currency faster than need be. It duplicates effort, and that's something to be avoided, especially at a national level where one bit of duplication is multiplied three hundred million times. Any inefficiency introduced in universal-payout-and-taxback will be egregious in the aggregate.
To me it's equivalent to saying "yeah we could experiment with a little salt in the soup, but why not just pour in the whole box of salt and see if it dilutes well." It's not our luxury to play games with our one economy, or our one currency, because irrevocable changes are irrevocable.
I wonder if the Hoover Institution would be interested in doing a cost-assesment of this make-it-rain-and-tax-it-back versus tactical-delivery. Maybe I will try and make a model just on the scale of a city or state and extrapolate from there. In general, I see devaluation of the currency because the wealthy are getting more than they need, so buying power for the bottom 50% goes down, meaning they must spend more on commodities, so there is more concentration of wealth at the top, simply exacerbating things. In other words, even if the costs are technically recoverable on the national ledger, the sociological costs of a "Universal" payout are devastating.