> I never said it was.
Sure you did:
> The problem is convincing comfortable, ambitious middle-high earners to put a cap on their and their bosses' prospects in exchange for the stability (and subsequent ground preparation for innovation) of a higher floor.
The thing about a UBI is that it works regardless of what the amount is, up to any reasonable threshold. If it's small it doesn't do as much but it still does better than the same amount in some other benefits. You can only mess it up by making it excessively large, e.g. you can't do a $100k/year UBI because you'd need to collect ~$34 trillion in tax revenue from a ~$32 trillion GDP. Everything other than that is a trade off which is basically asking the question of how redistributive you want to be.
The amount of redistributive we are right now isn't zero, so converting that existing budget to be a UBI instead is "free" -- it's a net positive to essentially everyone -- no reduction in prospects or bonuses required.
But we can't even manage to do that.
And we could even get a "real" UBI without having oppressive tax rates -- $15,000 for every US citizen comes from a <16% universal tax rate, i.e. a flat tax of <16% of GDP. That's the number with no other government programs, but it's also something that replaces most of them.
> You say "unintended consequences" when you I think you mean "undesirable consequences", but the funny thing is that they're both intended and desirable.
I mean unintended as in you won't like them.
There are a lot of things that it's hard to tax because they're hard to value. How much is it worth to have a job that lets you play with the company's toys, or choose who they hire, or who gets their contracts? How much is a piece of "intellectual property" worth? How about a contract with an unspecified probability of having a large payout in the future? Things like that can all be used to transfer value at a reduced amount of tax, but they bring inefficiency and corruption. Misallocation of resources, nepotism and cronyism, bureaucratic empire building, reduced liquidity, etc. The higher the tax rate you use, the more incentive there is to do these things in order to avoid it.
If you subject people to very different tax rates then they can be arbitraged. Instead of Bob in the highest tax bracket making $X, a dozen family members in lower tax brackets get "hired" to be paid $X/12 so the family gets the same money without paying the higher rate, and now we're incentivizing nepotism and cronyism again.
More than 90% of new businesses fail. That means the remaining <10% need to have significantly better returns for the founders than what you get by working a corporate job or nobody would do it, and if nobody starts new companies then markets consolidate as existing companies fail or buy each other, and the more markets consolidate the more they screw consumers/workers and the more influence they have over the government.
Tax rates have a strong effect on where companies build things. If you invest a million dollars in something that will produce a 15% annual return and there is a 20% tax rate, that's a 12% return after tax. If you make the tax rate 80%, it's a 3% return after tax. Meanwhile if you build it in some other country you get a 10% return after tax, and they're going to do the thing that has the highest after-tax return, so you raise the tax rate and the factory is gone, along with the jobs.
> Let's go back to an exec's lifestyle being tied to his job because he can't extract a huge paycheck without being taxed heavily.
Wait, what? That's basically setting it up so that your boss owns you, and how to set up the economy so that it runs even more on cronyism and favors because there is no tax on the implicit value of a back room deal.