> Wait, a UBI won't pay enough to live off of? UBI beneficiaries will all die?

They will all find work, which they will be able to without a minimum wage.

Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here and we have a $12,000/year UBI. Finding a job that pays $18,000/year is not possible for everyone but finding a job that pays $6,000/year is, so they don't die.

> Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure?

It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job.

And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.

> In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.

If we could actually do that, i.e. find workers to do the same work for less money, then we could/should do it regardless.

> If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?

A UBI is purely redistributive. You aren't actually buying something, you're only moving money around. It only makes sense to talk about "cost" in the sense of net transfers with government for a given person. For the average person it costs nothing -- they pay $X in taxes and receive $X in UBI, net is zero. People at below average income are net receivers, so if you want to talk about what it "costs" it has to be what it costs to people with above average income.

Moreover, a UBI replaces both welfare/basic job and the progressive tax structure, because the effective tax rate as (taxes - UBI)/income is inherently progressive even with a uniform marginal tax rate. With a basic job you still need a progressive tax structure, which from the perspective of our above average income taxpayer means they then have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than lower income people.

And under both the current welfare system and a UBI, the effective rate paid by lower income people is negative. So unless you're willing to put in place a system that is less progressive than the existing one, a basic job would also have to be coupled with transfer payments to lower income working people. To be equally progressive the transfer payments would have to be the same as the UBI net of taxes.

So they end up costing "the same" until you get to the question of what happens to people who can't find a job that pays a living wage.

Then under a UBI, you let people find whatever job they can even if it doesn't pay a living wage, and let the UBI supplement it so they don't starve.

With a basic job, the government invents work for people.

In some kind of hypothetical sense these could cost the same amount as well. You have a job whose actual economic value is $6000, under a UBI you take the job for $6000 and get a $12,000 UBI, under a basic job the government pays you $18,000 to do the job and then has $6000 worth of productive work done which it can sell on the market or whatever.

But the underlying assumption is that the government is as good at finding productive work for you to do as you are. The bureaucracy itself will waste money, it won't optimize for job satisfaction or consider economically productive activity like providing child care for your own children, and it will have the incentive to invent less productive unskilled jobs for everyone rather than matching each person's abilities to the job. Fundamentally it assumes that the government is as efficient at the market at allocating work, which is hopelessly wrong.

On top of that, it makes the relative value of the basic job too high, so that people have no reason to choose a real job that pays $17K/year and produces >=$17K/year in real value over a basic job that pays $18K/year but only produces $4K/year in real value.

So how does a basic job cost more? Because with a UBI there is someone receiving $12K/year from the government while getting paid another $12K/year to do a job that creates $14K/year in economic value, and then pays $4K/year in taxes, so the government is net -$8K/year to this person. Whereas with a basic job the government is paying the same person $18K/year to produce $4K/year in economic value (which they prefer over the $12K/year real job), so the government is net -$14K/year to the same person, the person has $2K/year less in their pocket and there is $10K/year less economic value produced.