
UBI and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness - ojarow
https://musingmind.org/essays/ubi-capitalist-consciousness
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sova
UBI is the right direction, but giving everyone hot bills off the
printingpress is not the way to equality. If you give a billionaire 10k and a
layman 10k they both move up by 10k, so equality is still not being addressed.
UBI should go to people under a certain income level, just like this stimulus
did, and it should curve towards zero as you exit UBI-range, just like the
stimulus did.

~~~
ojarow
Yeah I agree with this - under most proposals, this is actually how UBI works.

You can't fund a full (poverty level) UBI without progressive taxation (as you
mention, most people don't recommend paying for UBI via deficit spending), and
UBI advocates acknowledge that there will be a breakeven point beyond which
people's taxes increase more than the UBI affords. This achieves the same
"curving towards zero" of the benefits as if you had means tested people and
only given people below a certain income some payment.

UBI advocates tend to prefer doing it this way - giving everyone the same
amount, and taxing it back from high-earners to achieve the same "phase out"
effect" \- so as to avoid the bureaucracy of means-testing.

What you're saying here is pretty close to the "modernized negative income
tax" I suggest towards the end of the essay. Whether UBI, or stimulus-style
phaseout, there will always be net recipients, and net funders. I'm not sure
whether means testing is better than going universal and taxing on the back
end to achieve particular distributions, but it's important to note that UBI's
funded by progressive taxation, when all is said and done, are still
redistributing money from above to below.

~~~
sova
It's definitely better to do means-tested distribution because of the Friction
of Money.

A hyperbolic example: One might be able to send fuel to Mars and reconsume
some on a return voyage (taxes) but it costs fuel to get there and fuel to get
back. There is no such thing as 100% efficient salvation of discretized token,
so we have to distribute it intelligently to begin with.

~~~
ojarow
I agree it's certainly an inefficient process (universal payouts and taxing
some back), but so is means-testing, especially if it's to be on a monthly
basis. A monthly payout requires monthly means-testing, and we struggle enough
to do so on an annual basis. Not to mention the administrative and
bureaucratic apparatus required to handle the monthly testing and payouts,
which would itself be a source of inefficiency, and introduce numerous
opportunities for exploitation and cheating.

The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous
fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual
costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts
that are partially taxed back?

In theory, I don't see any obvious reason means-testing is less inefficient
that universalizing.

(My personal hang-up is on the gross cost required for UBI relative to an NIT.
Even with the same net effects, UBI's political feasibility is far less than
NIT's given the disparity in tax revenues required)

~~~
sova
>The relevant question for me, which I haven't seen explored in any rigorous
fashion yet, is to compare the inefficiencies of the two. What are the actual
costs of means-testing, and what are the actual costs of universal payouts
that are partially taxed back?

Well said! It'd be great to get something like this on the books. In general,
however, taxation is politically unsavory and, primarily, taxes have varying
surface areas based on states' laws, so any attempt at trying to coordinate
the appropriate amount of taxation would be indirect at best.

In my view, the universal-payout-and-taxback is a tarpit with no harmonious
resolve, and giving money to everyone devalues currency faster than need be.
It duplicates effort, and that's something to be avoided, especially at a
national level where one bit of duplication is multiplied three hundred
million times. Any inefficiency introduced in universal-payout-and-taxback
will be egregious in the aggregate.

To me it's equivalent to saying "yeah we could experiment with a little salt
in the soup, but why not just pour in the whole box of salt and see if it
dilutes well." It's not our luxury to play games with our one economy, or our
one currency, because irrevocable changes are irrevocable.

I wonder if the Hoover Institution would be interested in doing a cost-
assesment of this make-it-rain-and-tax-it-back versus tactical-delivery. Maybe
I will try and make a model just on the scale of a city or state and
extrapolate from there. In general, I see devaluation of the currency because
the wealthy are getting more than they need, so buying power for the bottom
50% goes down, meaning they must spend more on commodities, so there is more
concentration of wealth at the top, simply exacerbating things. In other
words, even if the costs are technically recoverable on the national ledger,
the sociological costs of a "Universal" payout are devastating.

