> Why? It seems like a great way to discourage people from consuming it unnecessarily while making sure no one actually suffers in dire poverty unnecessarily.
The problem is the entire principle only works because it's universal. Having lower or middle income people opt out of it would defeat the entire purpose of having it, and having upper income people opt out of it wouldn't save you very much money because they're not a large enough percentage of the population to make any real difference.
What does "work" mean to you? By "work", I mean that we solve poverty at a cost as low as possible. Having the BI consumed by non-poor people doesn't help that goal.
Also, India is a low inequality country - Gini is comparable to France since everyone is equally poor. So preventing the middle class from consuming a BI would significantly reduce the cost.
By "work" I mean you take some money from upper income people, give it to lower income people and by and large leave the middle class alone. Having the middle class pay $100 in tax and then receive $100 in UBI works perfectly well for that.
Changing that so the middle class pays $75 in tax but receives no UBI is exactly how you bring about the sort of hollowing out of the middle class we've seen recently in the US. It makes the middle class pay for the subsidies to the poor so that wealthier people can pay lower taxes.
And phasing out the UBI for middle class people so they don't have to pay the tax would imply having a UBI phase out rate that just substitutes for the equivalent tax rate, which is mathematically the same as having the higher tax rate and giving them the UBI, but is less transparent about what is actually happening.
Ok, I guess I don't really care about redistribution for it's own sake - I only care about fixing poverty. I guess that's why we disagree.
Incidentally, your scheme wouldn't work so well in India. In India there are far fewer rich people (proportionately) than in the US. Europe needs to tax the middle class for much the same reason.
If you want to have massive wealth redistribution that skips the middle class, the only way to make that viable is to increase inequality.
> Ok, I guess I don't really care about redistribution for it's own sake - I only care about fixing poverty. I guess that's why we disagree.
But that's the same thing. The only way you can get people out of poverty is by either causing them to legitimately have jobs that without-subsidy pay wages above the poverty line (the problem being they aren't qualified for those jobs), which if anybody knew how to make happen we would already be doing it; or to to subsidize them by taking money from wealthier people and giving it to people in poverty.
Doing this by taking money from middle class people instead of wealthy people only pushes the middle class people towards poverty and exacerbates the problem.
> Incidentally, your scheme wouldn't work so well in India. In India there are far fewer rich people (proportionately) than in the US. Europe needs to tax the middle class for much the same reason.
This is a problem that solves itself. Where there is less inequality you can pay a smaller UBI. If everyone had exactly the same income then you wouldn't need one, but neither would you have anyone in poverty. (Or everyone would be, but in that case you have no options.)
It isn't that you never take money from "middle class" people, it's that it makes no sense to take money from them at a higher rate (via a phase out) than you do from people who make more money than they do.
If you define your goal as having a specific redistribution scheme, you preclude all the other ways of fixing poverty. As you note, causing the poor to start working is a way to fix poverty - this achieves my goal but not your goal.
This is a problem that solves itself. Where there is less inequality you can pay a smaller UBI.
This does not follow. Europe has less inequality than the US but a higher cost of living. Therefore you can pay a lower UBI in Europe than in the US?
Concretely speaking, why do the French and Swedish leisure class need less money to live than the American leisure class?
> If you define your goal as having a specific redistribution scheme, you preclude all the other ways of fixing poverty. As you note, causing the poor to start working is a way to fix poverty - this achieves my goal but not your goal.
There are only two real options. Either they earn enough money or someone gives them the difference. The first is obviously preferable but unless you can do it for everyone you still need the second. If you could somehow have literally everyone earn an unsubsidized living wage then it would actually solve both problems, but there is no known way to do that.
> This does not follow. Europe has less inequality than the US but a higher cost of living. Therefore you can pay a lower UBI in Europe than in the US?
Typically if you have a high cost of living it's because there are some fat cats taking the money and therefore high inequality. What's happening in "low inequality" European countries is that the money is really going to taxes which go to not always very efficient social programs, or is the inefficiency cost of employment laws that prevent employers from downsizing unnecessary workers and so on. If those things were replaced with a UBI then the cost of living there would be lower than it is.
You have a point in that inequality is not the only determinant of cost of living, but it's certainly a large factor.
Let me restate what I'm getting at here. If you have the resources to lift your country's people out of poverty through social programs then you have the resources to do it with a UBI. Because having the money go to the lowest income people is the entire point, and letting it go to everyone is just the same thing as saying that the phase out rate is equal to the tax rate. An explicit phase out on top of taxes is equivalent to charging a higher tax rate to low and middle income people than higher income people, which makes no sense.
The problem is the entire principle only works because it's universal. Having lower or middle income people opt out of it would defeat the entire purpose of having it, and having upper income people opt out of it wouldn't save you very much money because they're not a large enough percentage of the population to make any real difference.