by eru | 2025-11-26 01:30:02+00:00
I'm not sure why you bring up UBI? Government welfare for poor people in eg Germany (and many other countries) is mostly handed out as money, but it's not a UBI. Whether a UBI is a good idea is indeed a wholly separate discussion.

> If you grew up in a roughly middle class environment, went to college afterward, etc. and you didn't know any crackheads in your family, you probably should stay far away from trying to find solutions for these problems because you're just going to wind up frustrated and wrong about worthwhile solutions for the rest of your life which will distract anyone from actually making progress.

I grew up on welfare in the place formerly known as East Germany. Bleak times. Not sure that will get me past the gate you are keeping here.

(As late as 2006 a government spokesman warned foreign football fans coming for the world cup of no-go areas that they should avoid, if they want to survive. Compared to the 1990s, the late 2000s were the Good Times.)

> Back to UBI itself I actually think it should go to everyone, because at the end of the day those who are high earners are just going to net out paying for it, and it'll be simpler to administer if "everyone gets it" and there's less room to complain about it and less hand-wringing and adjustments for whatever excuse people come up with for who gets some and who gets more. If everyone gets it, there's much less arguing about that stuff.

Someone has to pay the taxes to finance the redistribution. The average person can't get more out of the system than they pay in (by definition of how averaging works).

I would suggest to pay attention to the net effective marginal tax you charge people across the spectrum of incomes. Basically, for every level of income ask: taking account of welfare phase-outs and marginal income tax, how many cents of net income would a person get for an extra dollar in gross income?

This effective marginal tax rate matters a lot more than how you split the rate between welfare phase-outs and other taxes. Yes, for simplicity you could have no welfare phase-outs (aka UBI) and create the whole shape of the taxation graph simply with progressive income tax rates. Or you could merge both systems, and call your UBI a negative income tax.

In any case, what you want to really avoid are sudden cliffs, where an extra dollar in gross income costs you more than a dollar in net income. And ideally, you also want to avoid unduly high marginal rates (even if they are still below 100%) from phasing out multiple, uncoordinated welfare payments.

> The best part about a potential UBI implementation is that we can replace all of the government workers administering and declaring who is eligible for benefits whether that's SNAP or Welfare and one dude can be sitting at home and push the big red "send checks" button with an offshore team in India in case that guy is too drunk to do his job.

Well, as described above at the moment we have (at least) two arms of the government that assess how much you earn: the tax people and the welfare people. My suggestion would be to streamline that into one organisation. At least, if you want to keep an income tax around at all.