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Ok I'll bite. Why are these flaws irreconcilable to the point you no longer support UBI?

Let's take your main beef about giving money back to the rich. Why is that a problem? If we're giving everyone, say, $2k/month then it's naturally a scaled % of each person's income/wealth. For a poor person it's a lot. For a 0.1% person it's basically nothing. Additionally, there are very few rich people, so the amount going to rich people vs. everyone else is miniscule. Adding rules and overhead to manage this invites loopholes without actually solving any real problems.

I agree VAT is not the best and a wealth tax would be superior from a not-taxing-poor-people perspective. However, VAT is relatively easy to implement while something like a wealth tax is more difficult.

Mainly because economic velocity of money is higher and the inertia greater for money given to people who have none. If you give a rich person another $12k it will go into a bank or some conceptual entity like a stock or share and will not actually help some human being directly which is the main point of guaranteed income.

The main criticism is that giving everyone money costs a lot more and will also cause an undue spike in commodity prices. The more rich people you give some of the BI to, the higher the spike in commodity prices, and therefore the needing people are hurt again. It's the same reason we do not give billionaires food stamps, because the cost is subsidized by the populous indirectly through tax collection. It's not magic, UBI will not somehow be immune to the way currency has worked for thousands of years, and an increase in supply of money will only hurt those who have little, so that needs to be minimized.

Right, but my point is how much more will it cost? If we're concerned about giving the 1% UBI, then it will, by definition, only cost 1% more. I personally don't think that's a problem. Also, if you want to means test it and only give it to poor people it's by definition no longer UBI, it's just welfare.

Do you have any economic analysis you can point to that show commodity prices will inflate significantly under UBI for more than a short period of time? This is a criticism I see often from opponents of UBI, but I've yet to see an actual economic proof for it. In the real world prices generally tend to converge over time based on margins rather than on what people are willing to pay. It's not clear that UBI would immediately increase cost of production for commodities, so basic competition in markets suggests that prices would largely stay the same. This, of course, doesn't hold true for things like housing and healthcare that exist outside normal economic markets.

It's also worth noting that there's a good chance UBI would act to reduce the hours worked by a significant number of people such that their total income remains the same as before. For example, if your target income is $50k and you're having to work two jobs today to make that much, the result of UBI for you would most likely be that you quit one of your jobs, still make $50k total, and use the extra time to have a better life. I don't put much stock in the idea that everyone who receives UBI will immediately turn around and use it as additional discretionary income rather than changing other behaviors that have knock-on economic effects.

Fun thought experiment: I have 100 apples created in my orchard yearly but this year I decided to create # fake apples from sugar to help "UBI" the village and I wanted to see the effects.

There are 4 people out of 40 below the 3 apples/year mark and I served them in a PGI (progressive guaranteed income way). The inflation was 9 apples this year which means we minted 109 apples and had a 9% spike in commodity prices when we issue the UBI.

At Turnson's orchard, they also have 40 people, 4 below the 3 Apples/year mark, but they decided to give everybody a guaranteed income of 3 apples. They call it "UBI" and claim it will work wonders. Let's see: Turnson creates 120 new apples to cover the UBI on top of the 100 apples his orchard actually produces. The inflation is 2.4x so people who had 200 apples got another 3 apples, and ended up with the equivalent value of 84.5 apples. People who had 0 apples also got 3 and ended up with a grand equivalent buying power during commodity spikes of 1.25 apples.

At Turnson's orchard with UBI, the poorest of the poor ended up with 1.25 apples, and everybody else's currency devalued substantially.

At our orchard, with PGI, we were able to give apples to the poorest and neediest without destroying our currency's value or buying power. Inflation 9% during issuance of currency (See Kuwait in 2011 doing their UBI thing - tis one googles deep.) At Turnson's in this example, inflation is 2.4x during currency issuance and is supposed to even-out to some midpoint between 1.0 and 2.4x. 1.09 to 1.0 has the midline of 1.045 so there is more longterm inflation no matter what. How much depends on how important you think it is to devalue currency by giving some to everyone at the same time.

(Additionally, without an incentive to work, stay employed, or provide value to society, why would people not just accept their cheques and bail? Nobody in blind support of UBI seems to think there are freeloaders or slackers in the world)

Being condescending doesn't help you win arguments, it just makes you look like an asshole. Rather than actually answer my question with data or a study you instead decided to use a high-school level "thought experiment" to try and explain economics. Not cool. I understand economics quite well. I know how inflation works and how money supplies work. I didn't ask for explanations of those things.

At this point, I seriously doubt you've even tried to see what the actual impacts of UBI would be before you decided it was a bad thing and decided to favor welfare. If you favor welfare because you think people should have to work, that's fine and it's an opinion I can respect. But please don't try and use garbage arguments to convince people your opinion is right. If you care to read some actual data, take a look at [1], in which a UBI equivalent in Mexico caused less than 1% inflation. As for your Kuwait example, I don't think you actually followed the long-term impact, in which inflation for non-food items was a non-issue after the initial spike [2] and continued to be a non-issue in the following year [3]. From the link:

"With a great deal of public spending coming on-stream, and the effects of the substantial “Amiri” grant of KD1000 ($3605) awarded to every Kuwaiti, inflationary pressure is a concern. However, inflation dropped to an 11-month low of 4.6% in July, the last month for which figures were available, and the rate is expected to average 4.7% for full-year 2011, according to international press reports using figures from Kuwait’s Central Statistics Office.

Food price inflation, at 9.7%, was worryingly high, but is likely to abate over the remainder of the year as international prices fall. Increases in housing costs – the biggest single component of Kuwait’s consumer price index (CPI) – are also cooling off, as much-needed new supply becomes available."

[1] https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/publica...

[2] https://oxfordbusinessgroup.com/news/kuwait-keeping

[3] http://www.marcopolis.net/economy-of-kuwait-in-2012-growth-d...

Thought experiments are useful for people not versed in Economics -- Einstein's Relativity writings are pretty much just thought experiments.

Kuwait dished out the grant for only a year, right? That's different than adding new money to the supply every year.

Thanks for providing data, I'm always interested in taking a look. Everything I have read so far further supports my claims in my original post.

For one, the example in Mexico only gives the fund to a small portion of the population, which is consistent with PGI, and inconsistent with UBI. "PGI is welfare" is an oversimplification in my opinion, that's like saying this beet and poppyseed salad is food, yes it's true, but the nuance and most of the useful information is lost.

So again, the number of people being given the B.I. and the cyclicality of the grant have not been inspected thoroughly, but if problems emerge in isolation like the ones described, why would they not be exacerbated at scale. Most people think some sort of multiplier effect will cause advances across all disciplines, but putting fuel in every car whether empty or full is not the most efficient way to get the whole fleet going.

Do I think people should be working rather than getting BI? Not exactly -- my personal view is that automation will likely wipeout many jobs and humans will have to be more and more creative for employment. Do I think rich people who have factories and make money off of robot labor should also get UBI? No. Giving to the haves creates all these inflationary, distributionary issues effectively shooting UBI in its foot. At one point it was unclear, now it is obvious. I think that's how science works.

Kuwait is small and a 10% spike in food prices is probably a big deal, don't you agree? UBI for one year or a short term or a tiny population is not actual cyclically persistent-full population UBI. The leap between "I can whittle a chess piece out of wood" and "let's play all the grandmasters blindfolded" is quite a leap.

How often is your mind changed by a study?

> Progressive Guaranteed Income

Doesn't progressive income tax make UBI progressive?

But yes we should fund this with a LVT not VAT.

VAT is a highly efficient tax, very hard to game. But it's regressive. If you couple it with an UBI, you can fix the regressivity, and keep all the good parts.

It's a way to make VAT good, not a way to make UBI good.

Right on. What does "regressive" mean in this context?

Poor people pay a higher share of their income than rich people.

Ah, yes that is 100% true and likely to be true of any VAT implementation that hits consumer goods. If a VAT could hit B2B transactions only, it could be possible to "tax the tech companies"

The beauty of a VAT is that there is nobody determining the difference between consumers and business, it's just transactions all the way down, with later ones verifying the earlier ones.

If you start adding rules, it will stop working.

Progressive Income Tax on UBI != Progressive Guaranteed Income.

For one, think about China back in the day when people all gave blood to the same vat, and then some contaminated blood caused some otherwise healthy people to get ungood diseases. Why collect first + distribute when there is cost in collection and cost in distribution? Just because I can move the fridge around my house all day does not mean it will not tire me out for other tasks. Same deal, money dries up in converting between "types" so it's not smart to Collect + Progressively Tax.

Minimize motion, that's how you close the inequality gap, not by adding more oxygen-exposed piping that can be funneled, embezzled, exploited, and ridiculed.

Compare: PGI means only some people get a monthly check for Basic Income, and its based on how much you earned (this year, last year) and you can future-withdraw from what you would get next year, take too much and you owe it. It's even smaller than the social security office and would actually close the inequality gap. If you consider the most naive argument: the absolute amount of paper is minimized, that might be a simpler way to approach how collect+distribute techniques lose a lot of velocity to friction. Trying UBI with Progressive Tax is also not the same because one is multiplication and one is linear addition. $1000 to someone wealthy is not going to move the needle, but for someone at the bottom of the barrel it will move the needle a great deal, maybe even multiple indicators will move for them at that point. Thus, money is not linearly equal, its value depends largely on how much you have already.

Your concern about UBI giving money to the very rich doesn't make sense. They'll be given $12k, but they're paying, let's say, $500k in taxes. And if taxes need to be raised to cover this, then they'll be paying much more than $12k more to do it. Meanwhile, a poor person would be given $12k, and they're paying $0 in taxes.

Same reason it's nonsense to complain about including rich people in free healthcare, college, etc.

When you try to means test things, you end up needing much more administrative machinery, and you end up with weird discontinuities where it can be better not to work so you don't get cutoff from benefits and end up worse off overall.

You are sincerely suggesting that means testing for 42% of the population is more costly than tracking if 100% of citizens got their UBI yet. The machinery costs the same per person whether it is dispatching a 1000 dollar check or 12000 dollar check, so fewer participants is better in optimization on that accord.

That has the disadvantage of imposing an effective 50% marginal tax on people below the cutoff.

Explain your reasoning. No GPI is given to people above the cutoff. Thus minimizing cost while closing the inequality gap.

Earn 0: get 12k GPI Earn 10k: get 4k GPI Earn 20k: get 2k GPI Earn 30k: get 0 GPI

(for the example of a 24k cut-off bound)

I mean that if your paycheck is $10k you'll bring home $15k with this subsidy. But if you get a new job and double your salary to $20k you won't get a subsidy so you're entire income will be $20k. You got a nominal 10k raise but only take home 5k more, hence an effective 50% tax rate through this. If there's an actual income tax you have to pay that gets added to this and if there exist other benefits for poor people like Medicare then you might conceivably be worse off with the $20k paycheck than with the $10k paycheck.

Mathematically, a $10k Progressive Guaranteed Income like you describe plus a 50% tax on income over $20k is exactly the same as a $10k UBI plus a 50% flat tax.

If your paycheck is $10k you will get $(24k-10k)/2 = $7k. If you "double your salary to $20k" the difference is now $(24k-20k)/2 = $2k. "So you get a $10k raise and take home only $5k more" -- yes that's exactly right. You are suggesting this is a negative externality but I disagree, the subsidy is not a static guarantee, it is a guarantee of help. The whole goal is to close the inequality gap. Therefore, one will get less Guaranteed Income the closer one is to Climb-Out-Bound. That's the whole goal. If this is misguided compared to giving everyone including all the lazy asses and the hardworkers a flat equal rate, let me know.

The equation is pretty straightforward and there is a pretty graph here. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQTCmq0UwAAM7Ku?format=png

Choose a Climb-Out Bound and adjust the amounts accordingly.