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Comment by sova | Hacker News Reader

Too bad UBI gives money to everyone indiscriminately, weakening the dollar that makes it to the hands of the needy. UBI should be a gradient-based income scheme for people below a threshold. Otherwise, we are conceding that "Billionaires will die without UBI" which is disingenuous and not true.

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I’m trying to understand your point here. Weakens the dollar, sure, to some degree. I’m not understanding the “billionaires will die without UBI” part though.

It's a tongue-in-cheek statement to highlight the absurdity of giving money to everyone especially the affluent. Clearly, issuance of new currency must be done decisively, the point is that billionaires do not need UBI and therefore it should not be "universal." Giving money to all without "means testing" increasing the cost of the program by about 2x and reduces the benefit to the people intended to benefit. It does not delete the income inequality gap, but would simply displace it vertically without affecting the endpoints if everyone got an equal sum.

And are billionaires a meaningful portion of the populace or total payments? Or are you trying to both use means testing as a way of significantly restricting beneficiaries while still calling it “universal”?

The "universal" in "universal basic income" is what makes it undesirable because affluent people don't need money and giving it to them devalues money given to the needy, commodity prices spike when a fund is issued (like in Kuwait, they could not avoid it because when the supply of money increased commodity prices spiked up). While there are only 607 billionaires in the US, I was using the term billionaires as emblematic of anyone with a decent level of affluence. I do not think we should be striving for "universal" basic income because it turns into "universal" rampant inflation with diluted (= eventually zero ) beneficiaries

Income taxes and property taxes exist.

Give with the left hand so we can take with the right. How about not giving to the affluent in the first place and not lose on friction?

Many UBI proposals include a heavier progressive income tax or a tax on wall street. Even if UBI is given to everyone, the income stream weighs heavier on the more wealthy (or at least those paying more in taxes). Money is commutative, you can't just look at UBI in a vacuum without also considering the proposed sources of income to pay for it.

This ignores friction of money entirely. Let's truck fuel to the far ends of the empire only to truck it back. Plus, giving to all dilutes the value of the fund and concentrates wealth back into the hands of the affluent over time. "Money is commutative" nope money ain't math, ten dollars passed ten times among ten friends is $100 of GDP, that is not commutativity.

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