Killer Arguments Against Citizen's Income, Not (22)

Emailed in by Sackerson, from the Foundation for Economic Education. The first paragraphs are just lies and distortions, skip those and get to the KCNs:

Second, universal basic income payments would be given to all citizens, including middle- and high-income earners. By not targeting payments to those with low incomes, the proposal would transfer funds away from the vulnerable to the relatively affluent.

Bollocks. It's the middle- and high-income earners paying all the tax to fund the UBI, from their point of view, it is just a modest tax refund. By and large, it is downward redistribution.

To defuse this, all you would need is to give people the choice between
a) Claiming the UBI but not also getting a tax-free personal allowance; and
b) Waiving the UBI and getting a tax-free personal allowance instead.

For example, UK income tax rate 20%, UBI = £50/week. If the personal allowance is £12,500 (which it is in the UK), then anybody earning more than £12,500 wouldn't bother claiming £50/week UBI and would choose a £50/week higher net wage instead. They will literally not receive a UBI, end of discussion.

Only those who are pretty sure they won't be regularly earning at least £1,000-odd a month for the foreseeable will claim the UBI. Which is the much same people as those currently entitled to some form of welfare payment.

But the most apparent flaw with the concept is that it fails to require work or work preparation for its recipients. Although the current welfare system does little to encourage self-support, a comprehensive universal basic income policy would remove the idea of personal responsibility entirely.

What the heck does that have to do with it? There are loads of benefits which do not require people to be looking for paid work - the right to vote at elections, use a public library or call the police, entitlement to state-school place or NHS treatment, maternity pay, sick pay, redundancy pay, child benefit, old age pensions, carer's allowance, student grants, incapacity benefit (which I think is being phased out, it was disguised unemployment benefit without a requirement to look for work), plus all sorts of variants at different times and in different countries.

It’s a misguided approach.

No it's not, and the very next paragraph explains why:

People Enjoy Working

Public opinion and social psychology indicate that adopting policies with a demonstrated track record of discouraging work would be a bad development. In the 2016 General Social Survey, for example, 70 percent of Americans agreed that they would enjoy working in a paying job, even if they didn’t need the money.

So why waste column inches explaining that UBI would destroy the work ethic when real life shows us otherwise? We see that most people want to (and do) earn much more than the bare minimum they need to live, which is all a UBI would pay for. It's not going to change a thing for those with regular earnings of more than the personal allowance, who wouldn't bother applying for the UBI, that is just needless bureaucracy.

If the KCN held water, then nobody would bother earning more than a bare subsistence level.