Comment by avar
9 years ago
I replied to most of this in a side-thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15795996
But I'd like to elaborate a bit here. UBI is not identical to NIT because the difference is marketing, not math. Most of the electorate's basis for evaluating a given policy is not to perform a mathematical comparison of two systems and checking whether they yield the same results. How something is done is as important in politics as what gets done.
Which is why, as I've pointed out, BI isn't like NIT at all. The difference is how the idea is going to get sold to the public, not what each taxpayer is going to end up contributing to the system as a function of their income.
> UBI is not identical to NIT because the difference is marketing, not math.
But it's not even there, as proponents of both have stated that they are equivalent, and alternate names for the same thing, and they are marketed with the same arguments, and are widely acknowledged by their proponents to be names of the same thing. That is, the marketing isn't different, it's the same, both in content and on that the marketing itself recognized the equivalence.
The proponents of both have, in the words of a paper on the subject[1] agreed that "the two achieve the same distributive outcome through an appropriate tax-benefit system, [but] are fundamentally different from economic and ethical points of view".
Consider trying to introduce a universal health care system. You might say why do we need a system that subsidizes Jeff Bezos's health care? He can damn well pay for it himself, he might even agree since it's going to cost him less in terms of his tax contributions.
That's the equivalent of trying to sell NIT. Right out of the gate you have to not say "this is for everyone" but "it's just for the poor, but don't worry because...". That's what I mean by the marketing being different.
Of course with UBI the benefit is literally fungible, it's money. So it's really not like universal health care, but in the minds of a lot of people it is. They find it easier to accept the state providing a service if it's provided to them as well, even though it's a net cost center for them.
Humans.
1. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2052/1/MPRA_paper_2052.pdf
There are UBI plans that are definitely not equivalent to NIT plans. Some UBI plans require UBI to be taxable income for them to work. In that way they become more like guaranteed short-term (year long) loans for upper middle class/rich tax brackets. There's no similar proposal from the NIT side.
> Some UBI plans require UBI to be taxable income for them to work
That's still equivalent to an NIT (specifically, it's equivalent to adding the kind of refundable credit that creates an NIT, and reducing the standard deduction by the size of the credit, which may result in a negative standard deduction.)