Totally agree on the UBI being equivalent to a negative income tax in many ways! My main argument here is that UBI is a non-realistic policy when you actually practically implementing it, whereas NIT is the same general outcome but significantly more realistic. If you use the phrase UBI as the “high-level vision” and actually mean “implement it as a NIT” in terms of policy, I can get behind that.
Re: the simplicity idea, repeating what I left in a comment above:
Personally, I really don’t get the “easy to maintain” argument for UBI, esp. given my analysis above. You’d rather have a program that costs $4 trillion with zero maintenance costs, than a similarly impactful program that costs $~650 billion with maintenance costs? It’s kind of a reductive argument that only makes sense when you don’t look at the actual numbers behind implementing a policy idea.
You’re equivocating between real economic costs and nominal amounts of money transferred. Most of that $4 trillion is essentially fictional, taxed back again as soon as it’s paid.
Totally agree on the UBI being equivalent to a negative income tax in many ways! My main argument here is that UBI is a non-realistic policy when you actually practically implementing it, whereas NIT is the same general outcome but significantly more realistic. If you use the phrase UBI as the “high-level vision” and actually mean “implement it as a NIT” in terms of policy, I can get behind that.
Re: the simplicity idea, repeating what I left in a comment above:
Personally, I really don’t get the “easy to maintain” argument for UBI, esp. given my analysis above. You’d rather have a program that costs $4 trillion with zero maintenance costs, than a similarly impactful program that costs $~650 billion with maintenance costs? It’s kind of a reductive argument that only makes sense when you don’t look at the actual numbers behind implementing a policy idea.
You’re equivocating between real economic costs and nominal amounts of money transferred. Most of that $4 trillion is essentially fictional, taxed back again as soon as it’s paid.