It can transform the society into a poor one with shortage of goods.
In the US the average taxpayer makes $40K, and currently pays $6K in taxes, for a net of $34K.
If we add a $1K/month UBI, then under a balanced plan that taxpayer would make $52K and pay $18K in taxes for a net of $34K. That's a tax rate of 35% and is obviously feasible since there are lots of people & places with much higher rates.
Similar calculations show that a UBI of $3K per month is not feasible.
$1K/month won't cover rent in most of the US but it might be possible to live on it if you live in shared housing and eat nothing but rice & beans.
And if all the UBI is coming from the tax someone pays in, just lower taxes. It would have the same impact without all the extra overhead.
Only the average taxpayer gets taxed that amount. It roughly means a 16% tax increase. Somebody making $1M a year would pay $160K extra and get $12K in UBI.
The only people who wouldn’t be worse off are people with no income to start with. I assume they’d get some base level $1k UBI.
I think Andrew Yang had the right idea, in the limited amount I heard. Tax the cooperations that are using AI or automation to reduce the need for workers. Their costs are going down, while their profits stay high, so capture that and give it to the people who were displaced. Bleeding the middle class, and people in general, doesn’t make sense.
You’ve identified the connection between basic income and basic needs; and even identified that there’s full basic income and partial basic income; but you think that the “basic” in universal basic income is just a redundant qualifier of the “universal” bit?
The B in universal basic income means everyone gets a basic income to cover their basic needs. Obviously.
In particular, there are some UBI proposals where the level of the basic income is intentionally too low to cover basic needs. Those proposals aim to dismantle the welfare traps that plague non-basic income models. Once your income grows high enough that you start losing welfare benefits, your effective marginal tax rate can be very high. Rates above 80% are common, and sometimes they rise above 100%.
You seem to have confused yourself into thinking that since you could run a “universal partial basic income” scheme that the definition of the term UBI must refer to a general framework that can accommodate this. But that is semantically backwards.
UBI is universal full basic income. Partial UBI is a different thing.
It’s like saying you can do a 360 flip and then doing a “partial 360” where you turn 180 degrees.
“Full basic” means it meets your basic needs. It means basic. Binary.
“Partial Universal Basic Income” equates to “Universal Not Basic Income”.
There are also basic income proposals without the "universal" part. For example, only those who work get the basic income. (This is often called negative income tax.) This is supposed to give those in necessary but low-paying jobs a fairer share of wealth than what the market would give.
I've never heard of anything called "universal income".
You could set UBI at $50 per month ($300 per year). By itself, this isn't enough to survive on in a developed country, and the amount would be negligible for almost everybody. But if you're in a situation where $50 per month is going to make a material impact to your life, then you really need it. UBI disproportionately helps the most desperate. That's the point.
wouldn't it take us that much closer to "bread and circuses" i.e. that the State can even more easily buy (quite literally) favours from a subdued population. In a way we are already there, but UBI would really short-circuit the loop.