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I think studies I've seen "proving" UBI works have a number of major flaws.

For one, "universal basic income" studies aren't studying Universal Basic Income.

You might go "what? They gave people money, didn't they?" And that's true, but it wasn't universal. A friend of mine ended up selected for a UBI study.... But then was deselected when they discovered he had a middle class job. This means that these studies didn't look at the effects of universal basic income, but rather the effects of a means tested social welfare program, which is a different thing.

Universal Basic Income will have a potentially universal impact. It will affect the poor, but it can also have effects on the middle class and the rich, and if you're not looking at the whole picture, you aren't getting the whole picture.

Second, "universal basic income" studies aren't studying a government program of universal basic income.

They're studying what happens when a magic money fairy drops cash on people.

There are countries that has this through the magic of colonialism. Basically, you send people to go steal the wealth of the colonies and bring it home, making many people fabulously wealthy without any consequences for the people receiving the wealth.

Unfortunately the age of colonialism is over so you can't just go taking over other continents and nicking their shit, so a massive welfare program like this has to be paid for somehow, and mathematically it would have to be through massive tax increases on the entire working class. So to measure the effects of UBI you'd need to massively increase the taxes on the people who make money in your study to pay for the money you're handing out.

Some people think that you can tax just the rich to pay for it, and that's just a fantasy. Mathematically there isn't enough wealth to pay for UBI by just taxing the rich.

Some people you'll get more money back by cutting other government programs, and that's also a fantasy for two reasons. First, if you try to stop programs like medicare and medicaid to pay for UBI, you'll find out awfully quickly that you can't cut those programs (and I suspect social security would have similar challenges). Other programs like TANF are extremely limited and you'll find they simply don't have enough money to put even a tiny dent in the amount of money required for UBI.

Thirdly, "universal basic income" studies aren't studying a permanent program of universal basic income.

These studies have a fixed term. Maybe they're 6 months, or a year, or a few years, but there is a limited amount of grant money. This has a distinct effect on the behavioral effects you'd expect to see.

Consider yourself: If I said to you: "You're going to get $1000 a month for the next 12 months", what would you do? Well, knowing that the money has a time limit, I'd predict you'd use the money in ways that understand that the money is limited in scope. You might use it to go back to school, or you might use it to pay down debts, or maybe invest it. Now by contrast, if I said to you: "You're going to get $1000 a month and that's just how your life works now", would you treat that money differently? Would the reduced time pressure push you to consider looking at whether you really needed to be as productive in your life since you could potentially just get together with a few people and live a decent life under one roof? I feel like if my wife and I both had 1000 a month forever, I'd quite quickly be looking at what I could cut to just retire, and I'm a pretty high achiever. I bet a lot of other people would decide to do the same, especially if their jobs just had a massive pay cut because taxes rose like crazy.

Fourth, "universal basic income" studies can't predict society-wide consequences.

While it is undebatable that it wasn't quite the same thing due to direct supply-side disruptions, the COVID-19 Pandemic response sent massive amounts of money to individuals. This is part of why there has been high inflation for the past couple years, because people had more money but there was no commensurate increase in productivity (and in fact a drop). If we give productive members of society punishment for being productive, and we reward unproductive members of society for being unproductive, guess what sort of person you're going to build more of? And if I'm right and we'd see lower overall productivity,

Finally, there are studies that show "Universal Basic Income" isn't necessarily so great for the people getting it anyway.

Data published by Vivalt et. al. found Moderate decreases in labor supply (ie. people worked fewer hours by 1-2 hours per week), No significant impact on employment quality, No significant effect on entrepreneurship, Increased spending on healthcare (ie. people were able to spend money on healthcare they required, likely a positive), but ultimately it's likely that such a cash redistribution scheme would ultimate lead to more money in the hands of the ultra-rich and increasing poverty. https://reason.com/2024/07/25/bad-news-for-universal-basic-income/

From an economic standpoint you have to be very careful because "the map is not the territory" and money is not wealth, and wealth is not a static thing. You can give me a cup of sand, and if I'm skilled I can turn that worthless cup of sand into an expensive crystal vase worth thousands of times its original material cost. If I don't know how or I'm not willing to, then it will remain sand. In that way, wealth can be created by people from something that does not constitute wealth, and it can be destroyed of course, particularly if nobody is willing to maintain something that constitutes wealth or something that creates wealth.

There's a reason so many tech billionaires want UBI, and it's not because they're such wonderful and altruistic people (or they'd pay for it themselves). I suspect it's becuase they know UBI would stratify society into 3 classes of people: The ultra rich on the top who end up getting the money from UBI as people spend at their stores or on their platforms, the working class who end up getting taxed to death, and the underclass who would be getting free money every month and don't try to do much else. This social stratification would mean the already rich become much richer (even the taxes basically just go right back in their pockets), and the poor will become perpetually poor, and the middle class has a giant deus ex machina thumb on their back until the empire collapses.

Equilibrium doesn't mean you won't see stratification. Imagine a container with water, crude oil, and kerosene. If you shake it up, it mixes up, but it finds an equilibrium whereupon the kerosene is on top, the crude oil is in the middle, and the water is on the bottom. This occurred because gravity exerts the greatest force on the water, a lesser force on the crude oil, and the least amount of force on the kerosene, and so the crude oil naturally floats on the water, and the kerosene naturally floats on the crude oil. In equilibrium, and perfectly stratified.

The taxes required to maintain universal basic income are one force of gravity that will pull everyone down, but of course the poor won't pay tax, and even if the ultra-rich do pay tax, who cares? It goes to UBI so the money ends up right back in their pockets anyway. Meanwhile the working class and middle class fully feel the pull of that gravity. A second force of gravity will be the effect on asset prices, since many people will (like they did during COVID) take their free money and throw it into the markets. It's important to realize that if you implement UBI you can't get blood from a stone and it's likely that you will pull more money from the middle class workers than you give them because the money needs to come from somewhere and the middle class is where all the money is.

Arguably, we're in such a situation right now. The west is in a time with a fairly poor Gini coefficient, and some of the worst social mobility ever. The rich stay rich, the middle class might stay middle class (but many are not), and the poor stay poor. That's in spite of (but really because of) the government being 50% of GDP. Meanwhile housing, food, energy becomes unaffordable for anyone and everyone's quality of life is suffering.

To propose a sort of welfare program for citizens is to forget history. We had examples of societies that had lots of immigrants and then the state made citizenship a means to have the means to survive in the Greeks and the Romans. In both civilizations, there were many slaves imported to do work without pay, and as a result there was no opportunities for the working and middle classes, so as a result there were powerful social programs implemented. This whole scheme ultimately ended with those civilizations ending. It didn't help because money isn't wealth. You want your best and brightest in the working and middle class trying their best because they're going to come up with new and better ways of doing things and better ways of building wealth in terms of the stuff we need. Otherwise you end up slowly getting bogged down in a quagmire of the increasing effort needed to maintain the status quo while the wealth slowly leaks away into nothing or aggregates in the super powerful and wealthy.

Up where I live, something like 45% of of each dollar I earn already goes to government. With UBI, I expect that number would reach closer to 90%. I'd lose tens of thousands of dollars for ten thousand dollars in benefits.

Implement UBI, and there will be no livable wage. If they implement it here, my choices will be to flee the country and renounce my citizenship, or die in destitution with my entire family. I won't be able to afford to work. It will mean that the government has effectively confiscated everything I own because for example if I had 100,000 in retirement savings I'd only get 10,000 after tax.

I don't think in your calculation you realized just how bad the world looks with UBI.

The entire Canadian federal budget in 2023 was about $500 billion dollars and that's a number putting the country deeply into debt. Canada has 45 million people. If we assume only 30 million are eligible for UBI, we're looking at 360 billion dollars. There is no cheat code here, the money has to come from working people. The only way to do it would be to make that 45% more like 75% (I'll tell you right now I'd have to quit my job because I couldn't afford to keep it), but that confiscatory level of taxation would definitely drive down productivity so for anyone dumb enough to keep working it would likely be much much higher.

There are 45 million canadians, I'm picking 30 million Canadians as the Canadian citizens over the age of 18 which would make them eligible for UBI -- it isn't likely to be given to children or non-citizens, so there would be an eligibility critera. From that point it's an extremely simple calculation, 30 million times 12,000 dollars equals about 360 billion dollars. Since that's almost as much as total federal outlays in 2023, you'd need to effectively double federal taxes to match, and I'd expect that would double the top marginal rate assuming incorrectly that the same amount of money comes in.

If we give $12,000 to each person each year, that's what it would cost, disregarding administration costs.

Presently, even under the massive taxation up here, most individuals don't pay $12,000 in income tax. Only those making 60,000 or more pay at least that much(with much more taxes elsewhere including sales tax, local tax, sin taxes and the list goes on), so it would effectively mean a small minority of taxpayers would be on the hook for paying for everything. That would put a disproportionate burden on a small number of earners such as those trying to support a family on one income by working a dangerous, dirty, or uncomfortable job. Lots of guys in the oil sands working 6 weeks of 12 hour days would see their wages hit hard. They aren't up there for the love of oil, they're up there to make money and if you jack up taxes like you'd have to on them the companies won't be able to pay enough money to keep them at work because so much is being sucked away.

Under CPP (Canada's version of social security), someone could be eligible for up to 15,672 per year, but only 3% actually get that amount. The actual amount you get is proportional to the amount you paid in, so some people will make the full amount but many people will make nearly nothing. These limitations are why CPP contributions are 5.25% on income below $60,000 and yet according to the program administrators CPP is solvent for the next 75 years. The average CPP recipient gets about $840/mo. People can start to receive CPP at age 60 for a large penalty(36% reduction in monthly payments), or 65 for the base amount, or 70 for a slight bonus. The administration of this may cost a bit more money per capita, but nowhere near as much as opening the spigots to millions of additional recipients. The numbers simply don't add up. Moreover, you'd have to politically get people to give up a program they "paid into" all their lives, and that'll be difficult. As well, programs like old age security are going to be similarly difficult to get rid of since lots of people over 70 rely on it for a chunk of their living expenses.

The problem with speaking of UBI as a concept is that it's really easy to forget that there are costs as well as benefits, and the cost is enormous. The brick wall is between the people talking about all the benefits and the people talking about all the costs. Actual numbers matter a lot. If it is as I say and UBI will be the largest government program period and almost as large as all other government programs put together, then many of the discussions are nonsensical, such as discussion of whether the administrative costs of a small scale means tested welfare program going away would support the cost of a society-wide benefit.

Remember that this is at its core a discussion about actual implementation details, which is why it's referring to research. I've been talking about the big problems with the experiments based on the real facts about how UBI would need to be implemented.

I do understand you aren't necessarily advocating for UBI, but that doesn't change the fundamental problems with the concept. It's adherents are using studies that don't take into account the overwhelming damage the largest social program in world history would create. They just hand free money that came from magic to people and see if their lives get better. As I said, the other side of the equation is the massive harm to working people who have to pay for it, and the broader economy as a whole caused by knock-on effects.

Edit:

I'm just thinking of it, imagine if someone goes "if poor people are hungry they should just buy a farm!" -- and they produce all kinds of studies showing that owning a farm eliminates food insecurity for the owners. It's great that owning a farm is so great, but where did the money to buy this farm come from? I'm sure a lot of poor people would love owning a farm but it just isn't in the cards because it's not something they could afford to do.

The number of $1000/mo is hardly arbitrary in terms of what's being proposed by others. It was what Andrew Yang proposed during his presidential campaign, it was the dollar value proposed in the study cited in the news story I linked to, and it's also the number used in the study cited in the LA times article that started all this. If the number is unreasonable, it's not because I picked an arbitrary number to be unreasonable, it's because the proposed number is unreasonable.

No matter how you slice it, if the government gives $1000/mo to everyone, they need to get that money somehow. Usually the proposal I see is "progressive taxation", which I've factored into my argument. You could create a federal sales tax, but that would need to be extremely high and would greatly increase cost of living. You could tax large businesses, but most people don't realize how little money is actually there -- in my example of Canada, the entire TSX stock exchange has a market cap of only 3,529 billion, so an annual cost of 360 billion(again just using the numbers the others suggested) would take 10% of the value of all publicly traded companies in the country and would completely use up that money in a single decade.

Do you have $1,000 you can send to someone you don't know every month?

If $1000 a month is an unreasonable burden in the abstract, how about once it's embodied?

If instead of "someone" paying $1000/mo to a random person, what if it's you paying $1000/mo to a random person? Or worse, multiple $1000/mos to multiple people, since a minority of people will be net tax providers and will likely have to pay disproportionately for the benefits paid to a large pool of net tax consumers.

The key here is net tax consumer vs. net tax provider. Breaking even would make you neither.

If you get $1000 but your taxes go up $2000, you're not getting $1000, you're losing $1000.

Compared to means tested unemployment programs, you'd be giving this benefit to a lot more people. If we're just doing this by taxes, then presumably Elon Musk could marry someone and his wife would be the one getting your $1000 if she wasn't employed because technically her income is 0 because her husband is elon musk and she doesn't have to work.

It's not arbitrary at all, given that I asked you about giving 1000 to another random person. You tried to weasel your way out of giving 1000 by getting 1000 meaning you net don't pay and don't get, so I just reset the scenario to the one I asked about where you're paying someone else's 1000 a month.

There's no free lunch. For each net tax consumer getting 1000 a month net, you need a net tax provider or providers paying 1000 a month net. You can say you're going to pull the money from "elsewhere", but there isn't that much "elsewhere". In Australia, many of these 1000/mo will be coming from some poor miner risking his life working in sweltering heat in the outback to bring home enough pay to support their family.

Because we need to ask someone to give up the money they earned with their own time and effort to pay people, we need to make sure it's at least reasonably deserved or we shouldn't ask people to make the sacrifice. That's why welfare programs are means tested, so we make sure we aren't paying people who are otherwise perfectly capable of working on their own, or otherwise taken care of such that they don't need someone else paying them.

The fact that it's convenient to get the money opens lots of pandoras boxes. Especially if it helps encourage people not to be productive members of society en masse because taxes rose massively and a bunch of people can live a degenerate life with 15 other people in one apartment playing WoW all day long on someone else's dime.

I think we might have to just stop talking about this topic, because there seems to be a communications barrier.

And it might be my fault, after all UBI isn't an abstract thing to me, it's a thing that our idiot prime minister is probably going to try to enact if he gets any more of a chance to run our country into the ground.

That's where for me, it's an actual risk, and the things that I'm talking about are things that I'm actually concerned about imminentpy. I mean, our prime minister racked up the federal debt by a trillion dollars, tripling it. In 2006 we had been paying down the federal debt for years and even the response to the GFC was relatively measured. Starting in 2015 the spigot opened and unlike what huge government spending predicts, it's meant slow collapse in quality of life for a decade.

Our province hasn't done any better. In 2001 we had a balanced budget, and a total debt of 140 billion. Today, we have a debt of 380 billion dollars, and quality of life isn't better than it was back then. In fact, our electricity prices more than doubled during a short period after the spending started.

Meanwhile several of the rust belt towns I grew up in are just welfare dens. They once supported themselves by producing value to the world, now they're black holes of productivity.

So talking about UBI, I can't see anything but the overwhelming risks of what would have the capacity to be the largest social program ever, and after 10 years of "the budget will balance itself"(actual quote from the guy who then tripled the debt) and the government overreach from covid, my bias is that every threat from the government is deadly serious and every mitigating factor is a lie.

If that bias is leading me to be unreasonable in this conversation, I do apologize. At this moment I perceive UBI as a direct and immediate existential threat to my way of life, coming from a government that is already an existential threat to my way of life and the bias is so deep in my gut I can't see the world any other way I'm not trying to be a jerk to you personally.